The Revered (The Earth Epsilon Wars, Book 3) Page 2

  “Nice. What about passenger luggage?” she responded.

  “We’re gonna need all-hands-on-deck for this haul. There’s a lot of stuff down here. It’s a damn gold mine,” added Harris gleefully.

  “Get to work on stripping the board. Liam is on his way over to give you guys a hand.”

  “Roger that.” Justin pulled out a small toolkit from a supply pouch on his belt and handed it to Harris. “Switches, batteries, trackers, all the necessary wiring. I want it all. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.” Harris moved towards the board to get to work, but something caused him to freeze mid-step. He had just knocked something with his boot. It clacked against another object.

  He looked down to see he was surrounded by a scattering of animal bones. He could make out various small rodents, opossums, even something that looked like a domestic cat. To the left of him was the fresh stump of a raccoon, bone dry, and gnawed clean.

  The human survivors of this world quickly found out they were unable to eat any wildlife or native fauna due to the risk of transmission. Once the virus had jumped to the animal kingdom, it forced survivors to develop alternative food sources - the primary one being edible cubes of iodine, omega, zinc, and magnesium, which had been synthesized from advanced hydroponic vegetable and grain systems. Due to the Scourge’s erratic history of mutation, eating fish and other sea life was also out of the question due to possible contamination. Even after extensive studies and testing, there was no definitive proof of it, but the risk was still far too great.

  With rising dread, Harris swallowed the dry lump in his throat, a spike of nausea piercing his stomach from the realization. He knew these bones could only mean one thing.

  But before he could act, there was a sound.

  It reminded him of the low, seething pant of a waiting predator. Instinctively, his terrified eyes narrowed as he peered into the gloom, cold sweat now beading his forehead.

  In the ruddy darkness ahead, obscene shapes glistened.

  With his heart now hammering in his throat and ears, Harris blinked away the sweat from his eyes and raised his weapon.

  The second his flashlight beam landed on the hive of sleeping Afflicted, they exploded with ear-shattering shrieks. Dozens of them hurled towards Justin and Harris in a raging, lethal swarm. The creatures moved impossibly fast as they leaped over stowed freight containers.

  With flashlights being the only source of light down here, the cargo hold was now a strobing nightmare.

  Ally and Dan were still up in the first-class cabin, busy trawling through the interior furniture and closets. Ally spotted several packs of antibacterial wipes, but as she went to reach for them, the staccato pop of muffled gunfire erupted below her, causing her to jolt with fright. Almost immediately, it was followed by blood-curdling screams.

  Without even thinking, she dropped the duffel bag and snapped her crossbow around, but it was too late. A creature had already lunged at her from behind the cabin’s class divider.

  “Ally!” Dan screamed.

  She dropped into a roll on the floor and fired at the ungodly thing barreling over her. It raked her armor as the carbon bolt shot through its throat at hypersonic speed, flinging it back as if it had suddenly been kicked by a draft horse. Skewered to the cabin wall, it writhed and hissed, black blood gushing from its wound.

  Blasted by adrenaline, Ally sprung to her feet only to see Dan open fire on two more that had appeared behind her. The cabin became a deafening cacophony of inhuman howls and gunfire.

  “We need to bail!” Dan screamed.

  No argument there. As Ally started retreating towards the open hatch they had entered through, she clocked another one skittering towards them in a frenzied blur.

  With no hair, the arms and legs of this thing seemed too long. Its neck, too narrow. A curled talon extended from the tip of each digit, and its jet-black eyes gleamed hungrily. The gaping mouth that seemed fixed in a frozen scream, was nothing but a mottled hole of razor-sharp teeth. Its body was loosely clad in bits of torn clothing, and as it moved, sinewy muscles twitched beneath cadaver-pale skin. Hard to believe it was once human. Even harder to believe something like this could exist.

  Without hesitation, Ally took aim and fired.

  But this time she missed.

  The bolt cleaved the rotten air, grazing the creature’s shoulder. It disappeared into the cabin crew’s rest area as the ungodly thing continued to advance on her.

  “Shit!” She let go of her harnessed bow, drew her side blaster, and opened fire.

  There were flashbulb glimpses of shrieking jaws as jacketed plasma rounds peppered the creature, its body violently hurling back across the aisle. It fell to the floor with a wet thud.

  She then spun around and grabbed Dan by the scruff of his jacket, wrenching him along the aisle towards the cabin’s exit.

  With his tactical scope fixed against his mask, Dan continued firing while walking backward, surgically picking more of them off. They were spilling out of the darkness like startled roaches. “Justin and Harris are still down there!” he screamed.

  But Ally knew they were already gone. “We can’t help them!”

  “Bullshit! They’re still—”

  Suddenly, two more Afflicted lurched up the stairwell from the lower hold.

  Ally whirled around like the crack of a bullwhip and fired, drilling the creatures back down into the rancid darkness. Between bursts of gunfire, she could see more lurid apparitions ascending from below. Within moments they would be completely overwhelmed. She continued firing, draining her magazine down to the final round. Underneath her mask, the expression on her face had become twisted and murderous. As far as Ally was concerned, these unholy abominations did not deserve to breathe the same air as her.

  Click-click-click!

  Out of ammo.

  Growling with anger, she clipped off a smart incendiary-grenade from her combat belt and tossed it down the aisle. “Fire in the hole!” she screamed, before turning and diving out of the fuselage onto the tarmac below.

  Following her a fraction of a second later, Dan ceased firing, spun around, and leaped out of the cabin, several of the Afflicted scuttling along the aisle to also reach the exit.

  The grenade hovered in the air until it vectored downward to its point of detonation in the cargo hold.

  Neither Ally or Dan had hit the asphalt when the fairing that connected the wing and fuselage vomited flame. The powerful explosion shuddered the ground like an earthquake, cracking the plane in half.

  Ally and Dan smacked the ground hard with concussive thuds as white-hot fire sheeted over them, the shrieks of the Afflicted roasting inside the cabin, sounding like some demented steam whistle.

  “That went well,” Ally muttered painfully through clenched teeth as debris and ash rained down over the tarmac. “You OK?”

  Severely winded, Dan nodded, unable to speak as he waited for some much-needed air to refill his lungs. When they heard a symphony of howls echo across the airport, they both raised their heads off the tarmac to see a soul-wrenching nightmare come into sharp focus, headed straight for them.

  Liam and his team were running for their very lives. Behind them, an onslaught of Afflicted gave pursuit. They were surging like a river out of the derelict airport terminal. There were several hundred of them. Possibly more. Possibly way more. It was a horde. An army. Now they knew why this airport had largely been left untouched.

  It was a full-scale hive.

  Ally and Dan scrambled to their feet and took off across the runway, sprinting towards the Potomac.

  Liam stumbled and pitched forward, caught himself, then wheeled around to engage the torrent of Afflicted boring down on him like a runaway train. He began firing at the hip.

  A couple of the Afflicted dropped, but the rest continued the chase. Their screams of rage were ugly, shrill, and bereft of anything natural.

  Liam spun back and kept running. There was no time to even shoot at these things. Th
ey had to reach the shores of the Potomac and form a line of defense until they could exfill. Liam spun again upon hearing a pained scream close behind him. A human scream.

  One of his men, Wilcox, had been caught like a wounded buffalo. The Afflicted quickly scrambled on top and overwhelmed him, tearing off his armor until they found bare flesh. When one tore into his hip, he screamed from the pain, syrup-thick blood splashing out across the asphalt.

  Unable to help his friend, Liam belted out an anguished wail, malevolent screams drowning it out as they continued to close in fast. He had no choice but to keep moving, no matter what.

  The Speed Hawk swooped in low from above, banked sharply, and raked the Afflicted surge. Plasma rattled through the air like tracer fire, but it did little to slow the onslaught.

  Liam instinctively ducked as the salvo ripped the air above him with the intensity of a welders’ arc.

  Ooff!

  Without warning, he was suddenly blindsided by a creature. He went crashing to the ground in a blur of flailing limbs. His gas mask was ripped off his face almost immediately. “Ally!”

  Somehow, above all the manic commotion, Ally heard his cry for help. The second she spun around to see Liam; she knew he was a goner. “Liam! No!” Eyes already filled with tears, she stopped running, got to one knee, flicked her crossbow to full-auto, and began picking off any creatures that were attempting to clamor on top of him.

  As Liam mortally wrestled with the one that had tackled him, a flurry of crossbow bolts hammered the surrounding creatures.

  Ally kept firing mechanically in controlled bursts, but as her scope’s reticle landed back on Liam, she saw him look at her directly with pleading eyes. There was no way either of them could stave off the inevitable. Within seconds, two creatures had already skittered on top of him. They wasted no time goring him alive.

  Ally knew what she had to do. It was a promise they had made to each other should this day ever come. And it had. She was sobbing so hard; she was forced to rip her mask off just so she could breathe properly. The other teammates zipping past, screamed at her to put the mask back on, and keep running. But she had gone into a grim trance. At that very moment, there was only herself and Liam. They were sharing their final, unspoken goodbyes. There could be no hesitation. That was the promise. The oath. The deal they had made. Her wet eyes hardened as she took aim, exhaled, and squeezed the trigger.

  Her bolt struck Liam in the center of his forehead as the Afflicted swarmed over him, continuing their feast unabated.

  Defeated, Ally collapsed to her knees and let out a long, tortured wail. The Afflicted were now closing in on her too.

  Suddenly, Dan appeared behind her and heaved her back onto her feet “Ally, he’s gone! We gotta move!”

  But she couldn’t move. She just stood there, her eyes vacant, paralyzed with shock and grief.

  When she failed to move, Dan huffed with frustration and started dragging her by the arms. Eventually, she began to move on her own accord. Her half-assed stagger quickly morphed into a full-tilt run towards the Speed Hawk that now waited for them at the edge of the runway.

  With the Afflicted on their heels, the door gunner continued to lay down fire as the rest of the squad hopped aboard.

  Rails of plasma tore past Dan and Ally’s faces like streaking comets, shredding the incoming horde to confetti. The moment they reached the chopper, hot rotor wash hit Dan like Holy Divinity. They had made it. With a Herculean push, he threw Ally into the passenger hold and hopped up behind her. “Go-go-go!” he screamed to the pilot. The door gunner never stopped firing as the Speed Hawk lifted off and powered back across the Potomac.

  With her mask still dangling from her combat helmet, Ally sat there, slumped against the hold, staring down at the churning mass of Afflicted. Her red-raw eyes were empty, but the horror of this day was now carved deeply into her face.

  Two

  Ally sat alone in the wash of dim candlelight, hunched over an old king-size mattress. Still wearing her fatigues, she unconsciously twirled her wedding ring as her gaze drifted over the sparse living quarters, which up until a few hours ago, she had privately shared with Liam for the past twelve years.

  The militia she commanded had taken up permanent residence in the sprawling pedestrian tunnel system underneath the ruins of Capitol Hill. Each tunnel held a different purpose, and each communal living area was partitioned by a rudimentary patchwork of drywall and tarpaulin covers. These tunnels were once preserved for staffers and members of Congress, allowing them to securely traverse office buildings, the Library of Congress, and the Capitol building. Interestingly, they were never originally built with privacy or security in mind, but rather, D.C.’s volatile weather during the winter months. And now, hundreds of years later, they continued to provide adequate protection from the dangers above.

  Ally stared at a pair of Liam’s combat boots. They were placed neatly at the foot of a mahogany closet they had salvaged from the ruins of a department store. Resting next to that, on a chest of drawers, was his collection of old vinyl records, and a phonograph from the early 20th century.

  Those first few years were dark for everyone who had survived the Scourge. But out of that horror and decay, Liam rediscovered something that gave him hope whenever there was none. It quickly became an obsession. With every salvage mission, no matter what the objective was, he would endeavor to search for whatever music he could find. Whether digital or analog, his tastes were indiscriminately eclectic. No genre was spared from the rubble; rock, jazz, metal, country, folk, pop, electronic, whatever it was, Liam figured it was worth listening to. It was simply his way of staying connected to a civilization and culture that no longer existed. In many ways, he treated his music collection with the same care and devotion to preservation that an archaeologist might with an important ancient artifact. This was living proof that humanity was once capable of creating wonderful things.

  Ally remembered the first night he brought the phonograph back with him, and how giddily excited he was. She remembered how he worked tirelessly to get it in such good condition, it eventually looked better than new. Every brass rivet and wooden groove was immaculately polished and kept free of grime and dust.

  It also sounded great. Some nights they would lay in bed together, cheek-to-cheek, listening to entire albums before succumbing to sleep. Between each track, Liam would often make a point to highlight the unique warmness of sound that vinyl records possessed, as opposed to the crisp, and often hollow perfection of digital recordings.

  Like a sleepwalker, Ally now rose and moved to the dresser, gently touching his things, running her fingers through his clothes, feeling him in them. She could still smell his scent in the room.

  With a wave of her hand, she activated an old hologram recording Liam had managed to keep safe for years. It was captured in early July one year, sometime after the Wraith invasion, but before the Scourge outbreak. Liam was grilling steaks and corn cobs on the back patio of his parents’ home, surrounded by his screaming nephews. His older brother suddenly appeared behind him with a cheeky grin, waved at the camera, then quickly disappeared out of view. Ally froze the image as the camera landed closer on Liam.

  He was almost unrecognizable. The ever-present sadness in his eyes and the premature grey hair that flecked his beard and scalp were nowhere to be seen. Naturally, he looked younger and more energized with life, but most of all, he looked happy.

  At that moment, the full brunt of that day’s events hit her like a sledgehammer. She could not keep her emotions at bay any longer. The holographic video fell with her as she collapsed onto the concrete floor and curled into a fetal position, sobbing heavily, tears splashing through the hologram of Liam like electric rain. Her sobs became a hoarse wail.

  Even though she was surrounded by hundreds of people throughout this complex, she now found herself completely alone.

  Ally had no idea how long she’d been sleeping on the floor when there was a gentle knock that startled h
er awake. She quickly stood and composed herself, her eyes, red and exhausted from crying herself to sleep.

  Dan peered inside her quarters through a hanging bed sheet that served as a privacy screen. “Oh— I’m sorry. I can come back.” Dan was pushing the tail end of twenty-five, but he was a formidable soldier. Loyal, big-hearted, and solid as a rock, he was the type of person anyone would want next to them whenever the shit hit the fan. And in this world, that happened to be on an almost daily basis.

  “No, come in,” Ally croaked softly. “It’s good to see you.”

  Dan heard the pain and frailness in her voice. He gingerly stepped in as if tippy-toeing, knowing he was now entering sacred ground. Aside from being a tough and pragmatic leader, Ally was also known to be fiercely private. She guarded her relationship with Liam, and never acknowledged it to anyone. There was no need to. It was off-limits to everyone but themselves. “Need anything?” he asked meekly, noticing the flickering image of Liam on the floor.

  She saw what he was looking at and clicked her fingers. The image lifted off the ground and gently floated back to its rightful place above the chest of drawers. Even though she appreciated Dan’s sentiment, she would continue to grieve later. There was much work to do. She cut straight to the chase. “What’s on your mind, Dan?”

  Dan straightened his posture as if suddenly remembering his link within the chain of command. “A patrol just came back. They found another Infiltrator roaming around out there. Second one in six months. Damn thing was nearly torn apart by a pack.”

  Ally turned to him; her brow knotted with confusion. “Don’t the Afflicted ignore Infiltrators?”

  “Not this one. According to Jensen and Trey, they were running this one down it was like prey. Had it backed against the wall.”

  Ally’s eyes churned for a moment while she considered the implications of that. “That can’t be right. The Afflicted always ignore Infiltrators. That’s how we can easily spot them.”