Thwap. Thwap.
The arrows planted themselves into a tree’s trunk. Pieces of bark fell into Rick’s eyes. He looked around. He couldn’t see anything. Where the fuck were these guys shooting them from? He crawled along the ground through the cold snow away from the main group of camp members. Tuck, Dirk and Manuel followed. Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw dark shapes approaching. There were five of them. It was time to act.
“Let’s separate!” Rick said.
Both Tuck and Dirk smiled at each other, got up from the ground and ran from Rick and Manuel. They dove behind a tree trunk twenty yards away. Hiding behind the tree, Dirk grabbed a stick of dynamite he had tucked in the crotch of his pants. Tuck noticed it and started to laugh.
“You keep your explosives down there?”
“It’s the safest place I can think of,” said Dirk, smiling.
Tuck pulled out his shotgun from his backpack and got ready to face the attackers, who were fast approaching. He waited.
Rick and Manuel were still on the ground, crawling. After Dirk and Tuck left, two more arrows whizzed by. Rick looked back to the main group of camp members. They were about a quarter mile away. He could tell it was them from the flashlights they carried. “Manuel?” he said.
“Yes?”
“Run toward the camp on my signal! Tell them that we are being attacked and to get prepared in case we don’t make it. Don’t look back!”
Manuel nodded.
Rick could see the shapes approach. They were seconds away. He tapped Manuel on the boot. Manuel got up and ran back to the camp members. Rick turned over on to his back and grabbed his rifle and took aim at the shapes approaching.
The shapes became more clear as they made their way toward him. They were covered in blood and bones. Rick looked as their black silhouettes gave way to color and as the dim light from the stars and moon illuminated their shapes. They were cannibals. They had to be. This was the group Dirk saw when he was hunting. Fuck.
Each cannibal wore the bones of their victims. They were dressed like ancient tribal warriors. They weren’t dressed for the cold weather, but they didn’t seem to care or notice. They looked insane, like they’d spent too long out here. Rick could tell that they had lost all grip with who they were before the invasion. They might’ve been accountants or lawyers five years ago, but now they were reduced to their base instincts, to their pure impulses. This was the cost of the invasion. It reduced humanity down to its animal core.
One of the cannibal’s brandished a dagger and jumped toward Rick, flailing and screaming like a banshee as he did so. Rick fired his rifle as the cannibal flew through the air. Rick’s shot missed. The cannibal landed on top of him and tried to stick the dagger into Rick’s neck. Rick grabbed the cannibal’s hand before he could stab him and kneed the cannibal in the crotch. The cannibal cowered and fell to his side, giving Rick time to get up and grab the dagger. Rick grabbed the knife and stabbed the cannibal in the throat. Thick red blood spurted out across the crystal white snow. The cannibal was dead.
Tuck and Dirk saw that three of the five cannibals were headed their way. One was holding a bow and arrow, the other two were holding makeshift axes. The cannibal with the bow and arrow, knelt down and took a shot at Tuck who was still behind a tree. The arrow missed. Tuck jumped out from behind the tree and fired his shotgun. He missed. This gave the cannibal time to pull out another arrow from his quiver and take aim for another shot. Tuck loaded his shotgun with another cartridge and took aim. Thwap.
An arrow stuck Tuck in the leg. “Ya’rghh!” he howled. “You fucking bastard!” He crumpled to the ground.
Tuck’s cry of pain rang through the forest. It was so loud, the tree branches above the battle rattled. Snow fell from the shook branches. The falling snow fell onto the cannibal’s face, blocking his vision. The cannibal wiped his eyes. Giving Tuck enough time to ready his shotgun. When the cannibal realized what was going on, it was too late. Tuck pulled the trigger and the cannibal’s body shot back about ten feet.
At the same time, Dirk took care of the two cannibals with axes. As the two attackers approached, Dirk ran from behind the tree, into the dark woods. While he ran, he pulled out a packet of matches from his left pocket and lit the fuse on his explosive. As the fuse began to expire, he ducked behind a small rock. He heard the cannibals approach. He could hear their breath. He peaked around the rock. Large plumes of breath shot from the bone masks each cannibal wore. He’d only have one chance at this.
One of the cannibal’s noticed Dirk’s breath and threw an axe toward him. He threw his stick of dynamite. The two cannibals had no time to react. The explosive hit the ground between them and exploded. It killed them. Blood and body parts sprayed everywhere. Dirk wiped the blood from his smiling face.
There was only one cannibal left.
Rick got up from the ground and ran to Tuck. He looked back and forth, he didn’t want to pick Tuck up and help him until he was sure that the final cannibal was dead. From the corner of his eye, he saw a black figure apear from behind a tree. He turned to look. The figure disappeared. He was surrounded by trees. The cannibal was behind one of them.
Dirk ran up to Rick to help him with Tuck. Rick looked him up and down. “What the fuck did you do to those cannibals? You’re covered in blood!”
“I was a little closer to the explosion than I wanted to be,” said Dirk, half laughing.
Rick smiled, but that expression left his face quick. The last cannibal appeared from behind a tree. He ran up behind Dirk and grabbed him by the neck, holding a knife to his throat. He walked backward then said, “If you make any movements, I’ll kill your friend. I’ll slit his throat!”
Rick didn’t move. Tuck couldn’t move. Dirk scrambled, trying to break free from the hold of the cannibal. He couldn’t. That’s when an arrow whizzed past Rick’s ear straight into the cannibals forehead.
The cannibal fell to the ground, releasing his grip on Dirk.
Rick turned around. Bobby was standing behind them, holding his bow. Manuel was close behind.
“Good shot, kid,” he said. He touched his ear. It was bleeding. “Next time, try to avoid my ear.”
“Sorry,” Bobby said. “Next time, don’t give into my mother.”
Snarky little kid. He didn’t give in to the kid’s mother. At least, not in anyway that he would admit. Although, maybe the kid was right? Maybe he should have overruled Sandra’s stubborn look? They needed Bobby out here. He had proven himself. He was about to say something more to Bobby when he noticed the look on the boy’s face. It was one of shock.
Bobby pointed toward the woods.
Rick turned back around. Beyond Tuck and Dirk, beyond the trees, there was a blue light. It was coming from a rock face, at ground level. It was at the base of the mountain. Was that a door? Is that the bunker?
He didn’t think twice, he ran.
Chapter 29
There was something wrong, but it wasn’t Felix’s computer, nor was it his satellites orbiting Earth. There was something wrong with the message. It was as if it was hitting a wall, as if it was being intercepted by something. Whatever it was, his distress calls weren’t getting through.
Felix looked at his computer with a frustrated expression. In all his days designing and building communication satellites and software, he had never seen anything like this. To diagnose the problem, he tried sending the signal to another star system. When that failed, he tried sending a message to something a little closer, to one of the pathfinders NASA had landed on Pluto. That message got through. The pathfinder on Pluto acknowledged receipt of the message. So the satellites could send messages, but they couldn’t send them very far. They could only send them to the edge of our solar system.
Felix hypothesized that something out there had to be interfering with the signal, something very big and very powerful. But it was just a theory until he could prove it. And there was only one way he would be able to prove it. He’d need to get access to
a giant radio tower here on Earth. He’d need to scan the outer edges of our solar system for interference. His puny little nano satellites wouldn’t be capable of doing that.
He got up from his desk and made his way to the yacht’s mini fridge. It was empty. His water desalinator wasn’t working, so he had no drinking water. He slammed the fridge door shut and kicked it.
“Piece of shit,” he said. “What the fuck do I do?”
He considered his options. He could fix the water desalinator. That would buy him a couple more days out here. But the main generator on the yacht was losing power. It’s charge wouldn’t hold like it used to. It was solar powered, as all the Eco-Neg VI BlueStar batteries were, but that model of battery was notoriously bad at keeping a charge. BlueStar had to do a massive recall of the battery ten years ago. It cost Felix forty-billion dollars.
With the water desalinator broken, the generator on the way out, and the lack of food, Felix was left with only one option. One option that two days ago would have seemed crazy. But now it intrigued him. He’d have to return to the mainland. He’d have to finally stop hiding out in the middle of the Gulf.
The only problem was he didn’t know where to go. The shore was still crawling with motherships and just because he made it to the land, didn’t mean that his food problems would be solved. Once he got ashore, he’d immediately have to look for food. Most houses, buildings, stores had likely been already looted.
Once he found food, he could start looking for a radio tower. If he could get to a radio tower, he could find out what is out there. Once he understood what was blocking the messages, he could resume sending the distress calls.
He went back to his computer and pulled up a government database of radio towers in the US. He had access to it because of his security clearance with the government. He did, after all, provide every branch of the US government with encryption and firewall services. He looked over the radio tower database and tried to find one in a remote enough location that no motherships would be close by. There weren’t many to choose from. He scanned the list until he spotted one that was remote enough and powerful enough to do the job he needed it to do. It was far away. It was going to take months for him to get there.
“Starpeak Mountain, eh?” He looked out the window at the shore. He shrugged. “Lets do it.”
Chapter 30
There wasn’t a mothership in sight. John looked out the tiny sliver of a window in the bunker’s top floor. The sun was starting to set, but a storm was coming in. The weather seemed more extreme since the invaders arrived, more intense. The scientist in him wished he had some data to back up his suspicion. He had nothing. All he had were his eyes and a hunch. Nothing else.
The bunker was unusual in that it wasn’t underground. It was within the mountain. Starpeak was a small mountain compared to other mountains in the Rockies, but that’s why it was chosen. It didn’t stand out. In fact, John wondered if it even met the proper requirements for it to be considered a mountain. The bunker inside it had over twenty floors and used geothermal power to stay operational.
The top floor was two hundred feet above ground level. It was the smallest floor and was used as an observation room. Bunker commanders came up here to look for approaching motherships. The only motherships they saw were little black blobs out on the horizon, nestled over Denver, which was more than fifty miles away. No motherships came close to the mountain. Looking out the tiny observation room windows, all John could see were mountains and trees. They were safe. They’d been safe since they’d left Las Vegas. They’d been lucky. Too lucky. And the mathematician in him knew that eventually their luck would run out. He turned away from the window. He didn’t come here to observe motherships. He came here to clear his head and think. Instead, all he could think about was the past.
The journey from Las Vegas to Starpeak wasn’t as strenuous as he was expecting it to be. Seeing as Ethan was the highest ranked soldier among the SpaceForce survivors, he chose the route and the destination. Ethan said that he was part of a special task force that had stocked a secret bunker in the Colorado Rockies. He said he knew the location well and that if the survivors were going to have a chance against these things, that’s where they should start. John was just happy that he would be on his way to a SpaceForce installation. He knew that it would likely have a lab. Once he got there, he could start studying the alien spacecraft they had found crashed in the desert.
Ethan guided the group of SpaceForce survivors away from motherships and any hostile groups of humans they saw. They journeyed north through Coyote Springs and then east through Angle City. Along the way, they picked up a few people, stragglers mostly, unsure of what to do now that the world had ended. They also met up with what was left of a military convoy that was evacuating from a nearby base. The base had been attacked by a mothership just as Mission Control had been. The convoy was three trucks long. Moving the pieces of the alien spaceship into the trucks and vans of the military convoy made the journey a lot easier.
They avoided Salt Lake City and drove through the Grand Mesa National Forest. When it was all said and done, it only took them a week to get to Starpeak.
Since the first week of the invasion, they’d been here. John exhaled. He was tired, hungry and frustrated. He knew he should get back to work, but he didn’t want to. What was the point? He sat down in one of the chairs in the observation room. He needed to think about the alien ship he’d found. They’d made no progress on it in years. He needed to think of a way to get it powered up. He wanted to understand how it worked and the only way he could do that was if he could get it powered up in some capacity.
The lab had always been an escape for John. But in the bunker, it was the opposite. When the convoy of SpaceForce engineers and other survivors arrived, he had all the pieces from the fallen AOJ set up in the bunker’s large lab room. Over the following months, he documented and recorded every piece from the ship. He took pictures and saved them in a database in the bunker’s computer network. He then compared the pictures of the broken pieces from the AOJ to images of functioning AOJs, soldiers and other personnel had saved on their phones. Once he had organized and categorized as much of the AOJ as he could, he moved the pieces to a giant hangar inside the bunker. It was there that they reassembled the AOJ. And its been in that reassembled state for the last five years.
John’s main goal was to re-engineer the blue plasma gun and then find out how the ships utilized their power source and flew. They didn’t generate their propulsion from rockets or jet engines. Figuring out those things would be tantamount to any effective strategy to take on the alien ships. Human rockets, missiles and bullets were virtually useless against the alien ships, as were jet engines. John hoped that he could somehow harness the alien propulsion tech in modern jets, giving them the ability to maneuver with more flexibility and to fly faster.
The longer he studied the alien tech, the more frustrated he became. Nothing was making sense. Even the chemical composition of the metal plating that protected the ship didn’t make sense. He was correct in theorizing that it was comprised of components of steel and iron, but the last component was unidentifiable. Whatever it was, it wasn’t of this Earth.
But the most frustrating part, was the missing link to the whole puzzle: the translucent cubes. He knew that that they had to be the key to this whole mess. He assumed they were some sort of battery or energy source. To keep things simple, John started calling them energy cubes. He imagined that if he found a working energy cube, he would understand how the alien technology worked.
He tried numerous times to connect electricity of other kinds to power the ship, to maybe get it working, but nothing happened. It pissed him off. Without those energy cubes he had nothing. All he had was pieces of scrap metal.
All they’d been able to do in five years was put the ship together. It drove John crazy.
He looked back out over the Colorado skyline one more time and sighed. He needed to get back to work. He needed
to stop thinking about his failures. He rubbed his brow. He was tired. Maybe some coffee would do the trick? But the thought of the bunker’s coffee made his stomach churn. It was bad. It was almost as bad as the coffee at MIT.
Aside from the AOJ, the only thing that ever crossed John’s mind was Sharon. Was she still alive? Did she ever make it to Las Vegas? In any case, she would never know where he was. Not now. How many people would know about the secret SpaceForce base in the rockies. He hoped she was okay, but from what little he knew of the world outside the bunker, he knew that was unlikely. If she was alive, she’d be suffering. She’d be looking for food, for shelter. In a way, a part of him hoped she was dead.
John left the observatory. He’d spent enough time up there clearing his head. He needed to get back to work. He got into the elevator and made his way down to the hull, which was located on the second floor. He wanted to look over the numbers again. If he had to, he’d start from the beginning. That’s what the scientist inside him told him to do. If he had to take the damn AOJ apart and rebuild it from scratch, that’s what he’d do.
The elevator took him down to the hull. As the elevator door dinged, the doors opened. The large shell of the AOJ stood before him. It was magnificent. Whatever creature had designed it, knew their stuff. The ships hull was triangular in shape. It looked a little like a stealth bomber, but much smaller. The rudders that stood atop its frame looked like Shark fins. It was designed to intimidate. It was designed to inflect fear.
The ship stood behind a bunch of computer monitors. Wires from the computers were connected to the ship. They monitored electrical activity. John looked at the screen on the monitors. The readings read zero. Same as always.
The restored AOJ stood in the hull like a giant question mark to John. He looked at it, admired it, and became frustrated by it. He needed coffee. “Is there any coffee?” he said, as he walked up to a group of engineers sitting in front of the computer monitors.
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