“Of course, we’re finishing our final security sweeps,” Massey said. “In the meantime, we can help you prepare your equipment and suit up.”
She turned to a thin man in olive fatigues. “Daudelin, can you show them the new staging tent?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “Dr. Lovato, please follow me.”
Kate and her team followed the soldier toward a tent set among the white oak trees lined in rows around the outpost.
Ringgold and Soprano stayed with Massey as the crowd dispersed.
“James, I want you to start meeting with officers in the command center,” Ringgold said. “We should go over aid shipment logistics and evacuation rates.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Soprano said.
Another soldier stepped up to guide the chief of staff into the outpost.
“Where would you like to go first, ma’am?” Massey asked Ringgold.
“I’d like to visit your medical facility.”
Massey’s brow furrowed at that request, and she paused.
“That bad?” Ringgold asked.
“There are some horrific injuries, Madam President.”
These were the people who had been willing to sacrifice their lives to protect this country. As their leader, she figured she ought to understand what she had asked of them in defending outposts like this.
“I’m prepared,” she said.
Massey led Ringgold toward the museum at the 9/11 memorial.
Ringgold noticed people around the base pause their work, looking toward her as they passed. She saw a few whisper to each other, as if they didn’t quite believe the president was on the ground in their midst.
The Secret Service agents followed closely, scanning the civilians and soldiers. She couldn’t help but wonder if any were collaborators.
A soldier held open the door to the museum. Immediately the smell of antiseptics hit her. The moans and whimpers of the injured filled the first room she entered. Medics, doctors, and nurses treated patients wrapped in bandages laying on cots set up in rows along the museum floor.
Ringgold went to the first cot she saw. A Hispanic woman in her thirties lay on the cot. Bandages covered her chest and left arm.
“Is it really you…” the woman started to ask, squinting.
Ringgold offered a warm smile and knelt by the woman, placing a hand on her uninjured shoulder. “I’m with you,” she said. “And it’s an honor to be next to someone as brave as you.”
The woman’s eyes focused. “My brother died to help save this place from the monsters we were told were gone.”
Ringgold had prepared for this.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “We’re doing everything we can—”
The woman turned away, and Ringgold stepped back, sighing.
Determined to continue, she went between the cots, shaking hands and listening to the stories of the injured. Some doled out criticism; others, praise.
Regardless of what they said to her, she thanked each and every one of them. She made no excuses for underestimating the power of the Variants and didn’t make empty promises to them.
Soprano would have cautioned her about what she should say to these people. Sure, this might be political suicide to confront the truth like this, but politics didn’t matter anymore.
Her goal was to simply show her people she was there for them. That she would always be there for them, and that she was one of them.
“We have more people waiting outside,” Massey said after Ringgold had visited nearly everyone in the museum.
They went back to the memorials. The sun had since vanished behind dark, rolling storm clouds. A cold sprinkle fell over them as she greeted more outpost civilians.
“Ma’am, we better find shelter,” said one of her agents. “The storm looks like it’s getting worse.”
Massey directed Ringgold to a wide canvas tent. Inside were a few tables that were laid out with maps and computers. Nearly twenty soldiers and officers were hard at work, Soprano among them.
Thunder boomed outside, making most of the people look up.
“It looks like I brought the bad weather with me today,” Ringgold said.
“At least you’re here,” Massey said. “Your presence is going to help motivate people and reassure them we can get through another attack.” She paused, looking concerned. “But I’ve got to be honest…”
Ringgold steeled herself.
“We can’t take much more,” Massey said coldly. “What you saw today is all we have left.”
— 16 —
“You sure you can sail?” Ruckley asked.
She sat in the back of the mail truck parked in the post office garage. The color had returned to her face, and her fever had broken.
In just half a day, she had perked up. The antibiotics had worked. Now that her wound dressings were clean again, they were ready to continue toward Boston.
“My dad taught me how to sail,” Timothy said. “Our biggest problem today is going to be whether the boat is in good shape. Sailboats don’t do well if they’re neglected. If we can find a good boat, then we’ll just have to hope we’re not spotted on the way to Boston.”
“Variants can swim, you know.”
“Yeah, and they run, too. Fast. Wherever we go, they’re out there. But how many are really going to be out in the ocean, when there’s plenty of available food on land right now?”
She shrugged. “I guess it depends on if they want surf or turf for dinner.”
Timothy smiled. “All I know is I don’t plan on sticking around here until they make us dinner. I just want to get to Boston, radio command, and blow Mount Katahdin sky high before the collaborators do anymore damage.”
“Sounds like a plan, kid.”
He finished packing the rest of their gear. They had discarded some things they didn’t need so they could move faster, keeping just the necessities like medicine, food, water, extra ammo, and warm clothing. He had also cleaned their rifles.
“The river is only about a mile away,” he said. “You ready?”
She jammed a magazine into her rifle and chambered the first round. “Lead the way.”
Timothy opened the garage’s back door, did a scan of the parking lot, and then walked out into the cold evening. With only a few hours of light left, he wanted to move fast and launch the sailboat as quickly as possible.
If all went to plan, they would be in Boston by morning.
But it looked like that would have to happen in the rain.
Ominous storm clouds loomed from the east, rolling in their direction and releasing the first sprinkles that splattered on Timothy’s coat.
By the time they had made it just a block, the sky opened up, dropping water on them by the bucketful.
Just our luck, he thought.
He could endure the cold rain, but Ruckley wasn’t in the clear yet. Her immune system was probably still weak from the infection, and coming down with pneumonia wouldn’t do her any favors.
If Ruckley was uncomfortable, she didn’t show it. She walked fast, not far behind him, eyes ahead, and scanning for hostiles.
They pushed on for a good fifteen minutes, clearing street after street in the rain. Eventually, he spotted the bridge over the river.
But this time it wasn’t empty.
A black SUV was parked in the middle. He didn’t remember it being there before.
He motioned to stop. Then he snuck behind the cover of a wide tree trunk in a front lawn. Ruckley took shelter behind an adjacent tree.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered.
“I didn’t see that SUV on the bridge earlier,” he said quietly.
He went prone and pressed the scope of his rifle to his eye. Rain pattered his body as he lay under the leafless branches and zoomed in on the bridge.
Rust covered the SUV’s wheel wells, but otherwise it looked to be in good condition. The tires were aired, and the windshield and windows were all intact. They were tinted, preventing him from seei
ng inside.
He glassed the rest of the bridge and its vicinity but saw nothing to indicate suspicious activity besides the new vehicle.
“Screw the boat,” he whispered to Ruckley. “Maybe we can get a good car.”
She put a finger to her mouth, and Timothy soon heard why.
A second vehicle rumbled toward the bridge, this one a pickup. Unlike the black SUV, he saw men in the front cab and more in the bed.
Way too many to risk opening fire.
But if they were collaborators…
Timothy zoomed in to see if he recognized them, but none looked familiar.
“Maybe they’re friendlies,” he said.
“Or maybe they heard your motorcycle earlier. They could be looking for us.”
A deep chill ran through Timothy. He centered his crosshairs on a figure in camo.
“Wait until they leave,” Ruckley said.
Timothy nodded.
Twenty minutes passed. The men stood on the bridge as puddles formed around them. Timothy wondered if they were waiting there to stop someone or something.
Another forty minutes went by, cold water puddling around Timothy. It soaked his clothes and turned the overgrown lawn into a muddy mess. His feet went numb, and he wiggled his toes to keep the blood flowing.
Ruckley had hardly moved, but her face had drained of color. She was shivering.
He prayed she wasn’t getting sick again. He doubted her body could take another viral thrashing.
They had to get out of the rain.
“Maybe we should go back…” he started to say.
She shook her head.
Another ten minutes ticked by until they heard the thump of a helicopter. Timothy tilted his head to the gray sky. The noise came from the northeast. He spotted the chopper that seemed to be headed southwest toward Boston.
An engine roared to life on the bridge. Loud voices called to one another as the men pointed at the incoming bird. Timothy could now see it was a Chinook. The man in camo climbed back into the pickup’s bed.
“Now’s our chance,” Ruckley said. “Get ready to move.”
Timothy pushed at the ground, his freezing muscles numb.
As he stood, the men still on the bridge spread out, crouching, rifles aimed at the sky. The man wearing camo pulled a LAW rocket from the truck bed. He too directed the weapon toward the clouds.
“Shit,” Ruckley said.
Shit was right, Timothy thought.
These guys were trying to take out the chopper. They must be collaborators after all.
The black SUV peeled away, and suddenly came tearing down the road as the Chinook grew closer. Maybe the bird was carrying evacuees to safety or hauling reinforcements to bolster an outpost’s defenses.
A rocket streaked away from the LAW launcher. The pilots didn’t even have a chance to maneuver. The rocket slammed into the Chinook’s belly, exploding on impact. Fire and smoke bloomed around the bottom of the big bird.
Gunfire erupted from the Chinook, tearing into pickup truck.
While he and Ruckley had refrained from blowing their position before, now the stakes had just gotten higher.
She gave the order to fire.
Timothy aimed at the guy with the rocket and pulled the trigger. The top of the man’s skull exploded in a spray of red. The other three men looked around, confused.
Ruckley squeezed off a burst into the mid-section of one man. Timothy took out another with two bullets to the stomach. The third man ran but didn’t make it far.
The pickup suddenly exploded, and the resulting inferno swallowed the running man.
That left only the SUV.
The driver did a U-turn and sped away. Timothy fired a few shots but then decided to conserve his precious ammunition. He turned to watch the distressed Chinook.
The pilots somehow had managed to stay in the air so far. Smoke billowed away from the fuselage. But a second fire erupted from its engines, and the tail rotor stopped working, putting the bird into a tailspin.
Timothy and Ruckley watched it pass overhead as it spun wildly.
“Down!” she shouted.
They both ducked down as it rammed into a riverside mansion, exploding into a blinding burst. Timothy shielded his face with a hand, and a wave of heat rolled over him as he hugged the mud.
For a moment he just stared in shock until Ruckley grabbed his shoulder.
“Get to that boat before the SUV comes back,” she said.
Timothy jogged down the riverbank as flames licked the sky. Dark oily smoke drifted away from the crash site. No one could’ve survived that crash, and Timothy felt a pang of regret that they hadn’t acted sooner to stop that man with the rocket launcher.
But all he could do now was focus on getting out of here.
As soon as they got to the sailboat, he untethered it and then started raising the sails. Ruckley followed his instructions, and in a few minutes the sails filled with wind from the dissipating storm, carrying them down the river.
The small white craft sailed past the burning wreckage on the shoreline. The charcoaled cockpit of the Chinook was visible, sticking out of a collapsed brick wall of the house it had slammed into.
Once they hit the ocean, Timothy never looked back, focused only on steering the boat. If the brief battle was any indication of what this night had in store for them, he wondered what Boston would be like when they pulled into port.
Assuming they even made it.
***
The pilot of the single-prop plane was a Canadian man named Liam Tremblay. He had spent most of the long flight asking Beckham what was happening in the Allied States and telling him a bit about the cancer that was slowly killing him.
Before they even took off, he had warned them he was sick, which explained why he was so thin and gaunt. While Liam hadn’t said how advanced it was, he assured the team he could pilot the plane.
Flying into enemy territory while suffering from tragic disease told Beckham all he needed to know about Liam’s character. The man wasn’t just brave. He was a determined and caring soul despite the dire circumstances.
In the back seats, Horn and Rico were sleeping hard. Beckham had stayed awake to keep Liam company. He had always wondered what their northern neighbors thought of the Allied States. After all, the United States military had created the monsters now plaguing the world.
Surprisingly, Liam didn’t hold a grudge.
“If it wasn’t Variants, it would have been another virus or something that nature cooked up,” he said. “Maybe even an asteroid, or super volcano, or aliens, eh?”
“Not sure about the aliens, but I get your point,” Beckham said.
“To be honest, most Canadians don’t feel the same. They blame your government and are skeptical about helping your new government. Took a while to even find someone willing to take you guys back to the States, but I volunteered when I heard about the mission.”
Beckham realized now why they were flying in a bush-plane with a guy dying of cancer. The Canadians must have thought this was a suicide mission. They didn’t mind sending a guy who was not only willing to take on this assignment, but also might not have much time left on this earth.
He had hoped General Kamer would reconsider how much he was willing to help the Allied States, but this confirmed the reality of the situation. Kamer had a long road ahead of him before he would be convinced.
“Looks like we just cleared Montana,” Liam said. “We’re in Wyoming now.”
Beckham leaned to see out the side window, but there was too much thick cloud cover to make out anything below.
Their destination was an abandoned Air Force base in Cheyenne. Once they landed, they would switch to a helicopter that Command had sent along with a team of recon Marines. Their next destination would be Denver.
“I still don’t understand how the Variants could have gone undetected for so long,” Liam said. “I thought you all were watching the border.”
“We were, bu
t the beasts were mostly underground. North America is a big continent, especially when your military is a fraction of the size it used to be and you don’t have all the resources you used to. Even more importantly, the Variants had human help. Collaborators were planning this attack for eight years.”
“Human collaborators?”
“Yes.”
Liam sighed and shook his head, but his focus seemed to drift from the conversation. He grimaced and then took a drink from his thermos.
The plane shook and raindrops pattered the windshield.
“Going to try and take us under this,” Liam said. “Hold on.”
Beckham watched as Liam punched a few controls. Then the pilot maneuvered to start a descent that lasted a few minutes. The plane shuddered the entire way before evening out.
Liam started their conversation off from where he’d left it. “But you can stop them, right? The Variants and their human allies? There’s no way they can take over the Allied States, destroy all your outposts, and then march north, eh?”
It was amazing to Beckham that their neighbors didn’t realize the full brunt of what was happening to the south. Then again, it had happened so fast sometimes even people in the States had trouble wrapping their minds around it.
“We’ll stop them,” Rico said from the back seat.
She was sitting up now. Horn was awake too, scratching his unkempt, long red beard.
The plane trembled again from another pocket of turbulence.
“Are we almost there?” Horn asked, looking out the window with wild eyes. “I can’t stand much more of this shit…”
“About forty-five minutes to go,” Liam replied. “The Marines should already be on the ground, unless they’re late, too.”
“Nah, the Devil Dogs are never late,” Horn said.
Beckham was glad to be linking up with the Marines. He was always honored to fight with the warriors.
“Beginning our descent,” Liam said.
The plane vibrated violently as he flew lower through the thick clouds. A few agonizing minutes later, the nose broke through the gray screen.
Beckham got his first look of the Wyoming city where they were headed.
Empty roads wound between buildings, not a moving vehicle in sight.
Extinction Cycle: Dark Age Box Set | Books 1-4 Page 84
