They were nearly at the loading dock when an explosion ripped through the hotel and shops, fire bursting through the doorways and windows. Ruckley and Wong disappeared behind a screen of falling rubble.
“Ruckley!” Timothy yelled.
He rushed back to the mound of broken wreckage, choking on the dust and smoke. Another fissure ripped across the ceiling, spilling debris and fire that blocked his path.
“This whole place is going to come down!” Boyd screamed.
He grabbed Timothy and pulled him away from a fragmented hunk of ceiling that crashed to the ground. Another rumble tore through the building. The wall to the loading dock collapsed, and Timothy stumbled through a billowing cloud of dust and ash.
Lowering his helmet, he pushed through the grit. Boyd was just ahead, almost to the open loading dock. Another wall crumbled, coming down with the ceiling, and burying them feet away from exit.
***
“Hostile down,” Beckham said.
He lowered his rifle after dispatching a rogue Variant. It was one of the only creatures they had encountered so far. He was starting to worry Kate’s team had been wrong about the Prophet being located in the Palazzo. The booms and explosions from nearby blasts that had rocked the building worried him even more. If they were on the wrong track, it could prove deadly.
A few teams had reported seeing explosives that did not belong to the Allied States, and command had warned all ground forces to keep an eye out for improvised explosive devices.
He had heard Recon Sigma, Timothy and Ruckley’s team, calling command to request clarification on the explosions. Since then, they had been silent.
He hoped that was a good sign. That it meant they were still on target. But he could not help the worry filtering through his mind that maybe he was wrong.
Nonetheless, he continued to lead Horn through the Palazzo’s casino.
Webbing stretched from the ceiling between the slot machines and card tables. They sifted through a lounge with dusty booths and toppled tables and chairs.
A wave of explosions rocked through Vegas, small columns of dust falling from the ceiling. Their time to find the evil creature responsible for this madness was definitely running out, and his pulse thundered in his ears with each consecutive blast.
The radios came alive with the voices of frantic soldiers calling for help. Quakes shook the Palazzo.
Horn shifted around nervously. “That sounds close.”
Another boom shook the tower. This time it sounded like it had come from the Venetian, where the Recon teams were supposed to lay explosives to bring down the Variant hives.
That was the second blast near Timothy’s location.
“I’m breaking radio silence,” Beckham said, no longer able to contain his worry. “Recon Sigma, Reaper One, do you copy?”
No answer.
“Recon Sigma, do you copy?”
Come on. Come on.
Still no answer.
They had to move.
“On me,” Beckham said.
He took them back through the casino, smashing over the organic webbing. They raced toward the lobby just as another rumble tore through the building. Marble columns fell on either side of them, slamming into the floor.
“This way!” Beckham said, taking them out of the Palazzo and through the shops in front.
They raced between the stores, the whole complex quaking. Dark smoke clogged the corridors. Pieces of the ornate façades fell away in miniature rockslides. They were nearing the exit when cracks fissured through the ceiling and part of it came down in front of them. Pipes and support beams swung dangerously, just a foot or two from their faces.
Beckham navigated around the deadly obstacles. He struggled to breathe, the smoke filling his lungs as they advanced into another smoke and dust-filled atrium. A few columns surrounding an ivory statue toppled. Glass rained down from a dome in the roof, slashing at their ACUs and armor.
One large piece shattered on Horn’s helmet, but he barely flinched.
As Beckham ran, he thought of Timothy, praying the young man was out of the Venetian. But something had definitely gone wrong. The detonations weren’t supposed to happen for another hour and with Recon Sigma not responding, his mind filled with dark possibilities.
Had Timothy been trapped inside, buried under the rubble?
Beckham felt a chill trace his spine at the thought. He shouldered his rifle through a cloud of smoke, cautious of any ambushing Variants. He thought he heard the sound of clicking joints, but it could have been the structure coming down in all the chaotic clamor.
Finally, he saw the exit doors and rushed out onto a landing where he paused to stare in horror.
Up and down the strip, casinos were caught in rolling oily clouds of smoke and ash illuminated by ravenous flames. The biting air stung his eyes and lungs, harkening back Operation Liberty, back in those last days of the first war when he had run through New York’s streets as the entire city imploded, caught in a massive bombing run.
Only this time, it wasn’t his side doing the bombing.
Illuminated by the roaring flames devouring the city, the silhouettes of monstrous shapes flitted between the smoke clouds descending on scattered soldiers fleeing the destruction. TF Alpha was surrounded and attacked by Chimeras, collaborators, and Variants.
Other soldiers took cover behind burned out cars and trucks or slabs of concrete, only to be overwhelmed by gunfire or an Alpha erupting from a manhole, leading a pack of Variants.
Beckham desperately looked for a way he could turn the tide of this battle. But despite their experience in the field, he and Horn were just two retired operators. They were not equipped for this onslaught.
“Contacts on our ten!” Horn said.
He unloaded a hailstorm of lead, ripping into three charging beasts. Geysers of blood sprayed from where rounds tore into their bodies.
The monsters tumbled over their own dead limbs.
“Don’t fuck with the mountain!” Horn bellowed. He fired another burst at a pack, cutting all three down before they could get too close.
Beckham searched for a way out, but something held him in position. He had made a promise to Timothy, and now that it was clear the Prophet had laid an ambush, all that mattered to him was finding the young man and getting him out of here.
He wouldn’t leave Timothy behind a second time.
“Recon Sigma, please respond!” Beckham said.
Another explosion erupted behind them, heat rolled over them, searing Beckham’s skin. He urged them forward, heading south along the strip. The Palazzo trembled, large portions of the walls giving away, glass bursting from the windows. The entire tower fell into itself, letting out a grating protest of screeching metal and tumbling concrete.
Huge clouds of debris puffed into the air, mixing with pillars of flame and black smoke.
Beckham took to the sidewalk, ducking with Horn behind a wall as a wave of dust and grit surged over them. The tsunami of powdery air covered them, grit pelting them. Spikes of pain stabbed all over his exposed flesh. Despite holding his breath, Beckham still got some of it into his lungs, prompting a guttural cough.
A voice crackled over the main channel.
“All teams, be advised, air support and evac en route to extraction points. ETA fifteen mikes.”
Horn looked at Beckham for orders, coughing deeply.
“I’m not going to that extraction point now,” Beckham said, eyes watering from the smoke. “I’ve got to find Timothy. You can go if you want.”
“You think I want to leave without that guy? Hell, no. Let’s go get him!”
Horn led the way toward the Venetian where Timothy’s team would have set their charges. Beckham struggled to breathe as he moved, his battered muscles screaming for oxygen that wouldn’t make it to them. But the thought of finding Recon Sigma fueled him with energy.
“You okay?” Horn asked. He had stopped to let Beckham catch up.
“Don’t
stop moving,” Beckham said.
Horn checked him with a quick flick of his eyes, then pushed onward, navigating the piles of scree toward what was left of the loading dock of the Venetian. An iron girder had smashed a semi-truck. Part of a wall had flattened another truck.
Dead Variants littered the ground, and others were crushed in the remains of broken crates and fractured concrete.
Beckham spotted an arm reaching out of a pile. The gloved hand told him it wasn’t a monster.
Horn and Beckham rushed over to the buried soldier. They heaved off the crates to reveal a torso and a head, badly burned. The face was nearly unrecognizable, charred and bleeding. His nametape read Wong.
“Hey, brother, are you with me?” Horn asked.
“Help…”
“We’re getting you help.” He hated lying, but he could tell the wounded soldier wasn’t long for this world.
Horn suddenly got up and ran over to a bundle of pipes.
A death rattle escaped the lips of the man Beckham was with. Beckham had seen this before. Sometimes soldiers hung on just long enough to not die alone. He closed the guy’s eyes, saying a brief prayer in his head, and hurried over to Horn.
He was already lifting pipes off Ruckley, tossing them like they were nothing but sticks. As he uncovered her, Beckham saw the extent of her injuries. Half the sleeve on her right arm was torn, her arm burned and blistered. Her left sleeve had been burned off too. The stitches from her injuries along her bicep had been torn open again, puckering to reveal the glistening red beneath.
“Ruckley,” Horn said, strapping his machine gun over his back. He started to lift her. “We’re going to get you out of here.”
Beckham kept his rifle trained toward the street. “Contacts back across the street.”
The cacophony of gunfire and flames nearly drowned out his voice.
He put a hand on Horn’s shoulder. “We need to get out of here.”
“We’re not leaving her here. She’s still alive.”
Horn cradled Ruckley in his arms. She groaned, eyes fluttering open.
“Master Sergeant,” she muttered.
“Where’s the rest of your team?” Beckham asked.
Ruckley winced. “I… I don’t know.”
— 14 —
“Everything’s falling apart,” Ringgold whispered as she looked over the report from the science team.
She wanted to throw her coffee mug against the wall of the war room deep in Galveston’s former Harbor House Hotel. Instead, she took a breath, trying to keep control while everything was spiraling away from her.
Once again, the New Gods had overwhelmed their forces in a matter of hours.
And like before, she was left wondering how.
She hoped someone on her team, anyone, could tell her something helpful. But so far General Cornelius, General Souza, and Lieutenant Festa didn’t know anything more than she did.
Her team wasn’t doing much better at keeping their emotions in check than she was. Festa and Souza both wore grimaces on their face like they had knives twisting into their sides.
“Someone, anyone, give me a sitrep,” she said. “What in the hell is going on?”
“Our teams are being routed and pushed back from the strip,” Souza said. “They’re taking heavy losses.”
“Then get them out of there now!” Ringgold said in a voice just shy of a shout.
“We’re trying to execute selective evacuation protocols,” Cornelius said.
“Everywhere we try to ID an LZ, it turns hot in seconds,” Souza added. “Primary and secondary LZs are occupied by hostiles. There are no clear evac sites.”
“Then make some,” Ringgold said, losing her patience. “We need to help these people. Can we reroute them somewhere we can secure?”
“We’re working on that, ma’am,” Cornelius said, face growing red with frustration.
He joined some of the officers huddled around the computers at the side of the room. They pored over the maps and monitors displayed in front of them, voices rising frantically.
Another team of communications officers manned computers coordinating the movements of the two task forces through the streets of Las Vegas. A fifty-five-inch monitor on one wall showed a map of the city, along with red blips to indicate where the ground forces had spotted hostiles. Green blips designated the locations of Allied States troops.
Too many of those green blips representing individual divisions and squads had already been crossed out as reports of confirmed KIAs filtered in. She watched another rash of green blips get crossed out, and an almost palpable pain struck through her gut.
“I’m getting confirmation that the explosions the teams are reporting aren’t from our demo crews,” Souza said. “The bombs going off were planted well before our teams got there.”
“What… but…” Ringgold began to say.
“This was a trap,” Cornelius said dryly. “They set enough explosives to bring down the whole damn city. They knew we were coming.”
“How?” Ringgold asked. “How are they ahead of us every single damn time!?”
No one had an answer and avoided her gaze.
Ringgold looked back down at the message Kate had sent her hours earlier. The doctor had reported a Santa Fe-based company operating out of Los Alamos National Laboratory called OrgoProct. Their science division was led by Charles Morgan, which seemed to link all the strange technologies of the New Gods. The evidence was circumstantial at best, but the story seemed to make more sense as Ringgold thought about it.
The most startling revelation was that the New Gods had no known ties to Las Vegas.
Was this a New Gods’ stronghold? Was it even an actual base?
Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe this was all a façade.
One thing was certain, the Prophet was more intelligent than any Alpha she had faced in the past decade. She was going to have to think well outside of the box to beat the evil abomination.
“Have we found any of their leadership?” Ringgold asked.
“No,” Souza replied. “However, Team Ghost is still within the UMC where they reported strong resistance. That kind of resistance might indicate New Gods leaders are nearby.”
“So there’s still hope,” Ringgold said, clinging to any remote chance they might yet succeed with their initial objective. But that ephemeral hope was fading with every KIA reported on the monitor. “Have we heard anything from Ghost recently?”
“Not since they went radio silent.”
“Almost all other units, even those on the retreat, are still engaged in skirmishes,” Cornelius said, returning to the table.
He clicked a button on his keyboard, and the main monitor in the room shifted to the view from a helmet-mounted camera on a TF Bravo squad leader.
The rattle of gunfire sizzled over the speakers. Flames erupted over the parapets of the Excalibur hotel. A few of the towers on the castle had crumbled.
“Hostiles at our twelve and three!” a voice yelled over the speakers.
More flashes of tracer fire cut through the black of night. Ghoulish screams filled the comm as monsters swarmed from the flames, hurdling over the debris and ripping into the soldiers.
Ringgold turned away at the sound of tearing flesh and anguished yells.
“This is what the evac sites look like,” Cornelius said, voice weak.
Cornelius switched to a feed from a helicopter. A door gunner manned an M-249 as the chopper swooped low over the fires spreading through the Vegas streets. The gunner raked machine gunfire over a pack of Variants, riddling their diseased flesh with bullets.
Despite the gunner’s best efforts, a pack of the beasts broke into the lines of soldiers on the ground.
Ringgold’s stomach clenched, her mouth going dry. Any hope she had had that Team Ghost might still find the Prophet was overshadowed by the massacre unfolding on the Vegas strip.
The New Gods had set this deception perfectly, luring her people into their clutches like a t
rapdoor spider. But what was their goal? To slaughter her forces or was something else going on?
She looked around the room at the exhausted faces, scrambling to organize a battle that seemed to have already been lost. Grainy images of the Variants played across many of the screens, along with a few videos of collaborators. The maps of enemy units showed several collaborator units and plenty of Variants.
But no Chimeras.
That sent another wave of chills through her.
“How many Chimeras have been reported?” Ringgold asked.
“I’m not sure,” Souza said. “But not many. Maybe a few dozen. Initial reports of Chimeras turned out to be mostly collaborators.”
Ringgold looked at the ceiling, considering the implications, mind racing. “If this really were brains of the New God’s operations, we would have seen more of them, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I thought so too, but it’s possible they are all protecting the Prophet,” Souza said.
“Or they are preparing to launch an assault while we’ve got all our focus on Vegas,” Festa suggested.
“Send warnings to every remaining outpost immediately,” Ringgold said. “Every able-bodied man and woman should already be on the wall, but they need to know how serious this is. They must be prepared for anything. An attack tonight could be worse than anything we faced before.”
“Yes, Madam President,” Festa said.
He began making calls to the twelve outposts scattered between Houston and Key Largo, the last of the Florida outposts. A few of Cornelius’ comms officers came over to him, pointing at a map they laid on the table.
“We now have alternate evacuation routes set up for the two task forces,” Cornelius said. “They’ll be headed north out of the city, where parts of Las Vegas Boulevard are still intact.”
He used the map on the monitor to discuss the routes with Ringgold for a few minutes before Festa returned to the table. His face was awash in pallor.
“What’s wrong?” Ringgold asked. “Are there problems with the outposts?”
“Worse, Madam President,” he replied. “We just got a transmission from the First Fleet in Puerto Rico. Scouts have reported seeing vessels of all kinds and sizes headed toward them, like some kind of scrapped together navy.”
Extinction Cycle: Dark Age Box Set | Books 1-4 Page 113
