***
Sergeant John Roper sucked in his breath as the alien craft passed overhead, its presence marked by an eerie hum that seemed just below hearing level. Bolts of shimmering blue-white light lanced down from the craft, targeting the mortar firing positions; John silently prayed that they’d managed to escape before it was too late. But there was no way to know.
He pulled the Stinger missile launcher from his back and took aim at the alien craft. The seeker heads had been heavily modified – he’d been told that the work had been done in underground factories, although he wasn't sure he believed it – to track the alien craft, although that was no guarantee of a hit. The craft was so fast that they could be halfway around the world by the time the missile reached their previous location, or they could turn their energy weapons on the incoming missile. If they hadn't been such poor shots, the missiles would have been completely useless.
The seeker head growled as it locked onto the target, allowing him to pull the trigger. It jerked in his hands as the missile lanced upwards towards the alien craft, before he threw it away and started to run. There was no point in staying where he was now; as soon as the aliens had escaped the missile, it would come after him. He was surprised that they hadn't learned that MANPAD launchers could only fire one missile before they were thrown away, but maybe they had a point. Killing the people who fired the weapons might convince others not to do the same.
This time, the aliens were unlucky. The missile struck the craft, sending brilliant flares of light spinning over its darkened hull. For a chilling moment, John thought that it would survive, before it careened over and plummeted towards the ground. There was a colossal thump when it hit the earth, setting fire to the forest around it. John winced inwardly, wondering if the fires would make it harder to escape after the attack was completed, before he kept moving. One craft might have been taken down, but others would be on their way ...
... And they’d be much more careful now they knew that the insurgents were armed with MANPAD weapons.
He smiled to himself as the sound of gunfire echoed through the night air. If nothing else, a great many Order Policemen were dead and the aliens had lost a craft. A very good day’s work.
Chapter Nine
Near Mannington, Virginia, USA
Day 199/200
Judith Dent watched with grim amusement as the Order Policemen scurried around like ants, unsure of what to do. The mortar attacks had unhinged them, while the two successful suicide attacks had made them panic. Judith was unsure of just what they thought they were shooting at when they fired their guns out into the darkness, but she was fairly sure that all they were doing was wasting ammunition. They had depended on the aliens to provide them with cover and the first craft the aliens had sent was now burning in the midst of the forest.
She peered through her scope as someone started to take charge, bellowing orders and laying about him with a swagger stick to restore some degree of order. He was brave, she had to admit, even if he was fighting for the wrong side. She wouldn't have wanted to lash out at men who were both armed and on the verge of panicking completely. But she couldn't allow him to continue trying to rally his men.
Instead, she took aim and fired, once. The bullet passed through the man’s head, sending him crumpling to the ground. His men stared in horror, then started hunting for cover. Judith smiled tightly, then shot two more of them dead in quick succession. Whatever discipline they’d kept crumbled under her fire; they fled, rather than trying to fight back.
The hills have eyes, she thought, as she slung her rifle over her back and started to walk back to the RV point. Shooting at men no longer bothered her, even if she had been sick the first time she'd killed a man, no matter how much he’d deserved it. She’d become what she needed to be to survive.
***
It had been years since the President had gone into action and longer still since he’d been an infantryman, but he’d been careful to keep up with his shooting skills on the White House shooting range. The Secret Service had been horrified at the thought of the President ever having to defend himself in person, yet he’d insisted – and besides, he could imagine the targets as having the faces of his political opponents. Now, as he clutched his pistol in one hand, he was silently grateful for his own paranoia.
“Stay here,” Pepper ordered, as she started to open the hatch. “If we are discovered ...”
The President nodded. Their bunker had two exits, but one of them was far too close to the enemy base for comfort. Pepper had agonised for hours, trying to decide if that was a coincidence or a sign that the aliens knew where they were, before the President had pointed out that if the aliens knew they would hardly need to play games when they could just have stormed the bunker and dragged the President out over Pepper’s dead body. It was much more likely that it was just a coincidence.
He watched Pepper as she opened the hatch and climbed out, holding her pistol in one hand. The house above them had been purchased, years ago, by a patriot who hadn't asked too many questions, the paper trail carefully obscured by the Secret Service. At one point, the President had found it amusing; an accountant, doing a standard audit, might have stumbled across the scheme and unravelled it without ever really knowing what he was doing. But the owner had died in Washington and few people were asking questions about house ownership these days.
I suppose we’re lucky the new authorities didn't earmark the house for someone else to use, he thought, straining his ears for a sound. Something – anything – that wasn't from the bunker. We might have popped up under a family of innocents – or collaborators. No one would have believed that they didn’t know.
He smiled at the thought as Pepper stuck her head back into the passageway. “You can come up,” she said, very quietly. “But be on the alert.”
The President nodded, clambering up the ladder with one hand while holding his gun in the other. It was irritating just how far his body had decayed from his military days; there had been a time when he’d been able to carry the full 36+kg without any major problems, or scramble down a rope ladder into the teeth of enemy fire. Now ... he was a fat-assed politician, just like the ones he’d bitched and moaned about while he’d been a soldier. The irony didn't amuse him.
He glanced around as they came up into the basement, seeing nothing apart from a handful of decaying pieces of furniture. The team in charge of making the house look normal had decided not to stockpile food or survival gear, even though there had been a growing craze for such stockpiles in the years after Wall Street had fallen into depression. Some of the survivalists, the President had heard, had been lording it over their less well-prepared brethren. It was hard to blame them. Precautions often looked excessive until the emergency actually arrived, at which point it was usually too late to take them. God knew that the government’s preparations for alien invasion had proved laughable when the shit had hit the fan.
“Up here,” Pepper said, from above. “Hurry.”
The President could hear shooting as he climbed up the stairs and stepped out of the basement, finding himself in a fairly normal kitchen. Dust lay everywhere; his nose twitched as he smelled the unmistakable stench of rotting food. The planners had put a freezer in the kitchen, of course, but it had failed when the aliens turned off the power and never replaced. He wrinkled his nose – the stench was appalling – and then followed Pepper into the darkened yard.
He’d never visited Mannington in daylight, but he’d assumed – despite the footage from hidden cameras and other surveillance devices – that it was a normal American town, glowing with life. Instead, he could sense fear, a pervading sensation that seemed to crawl down his spine, a mocking reminder that humanity was no longer in control of its own destiny. The only light was provided by the fires in the distance. It made him wonder just how the aliens were distributing power, if they were even bothering. Denying the population unfettered access to power would make it harder for the resistance to operate freely.
But it would also irritate people, he thought, recalling some of the emergency manuals he’d been encouraged to read in the Oval Office. The planners had come up with workable scenarios for everything from civil war to a mass disease outbreak. They’d even tagged the latter The Coward’s Way of War. But the plans for alien invasion had been laughable. The planners had never fully comprehended what they faced, even after the first alien craft had crash-landed. He still found it hard to comprehend just how much the world had changed.
“Stay in the shadows,” Pepper hissed. The sound of shooting was growing louder – and closer. “Don’t let anyone see you.”
The President gave her an icy look, but nodded. It was unlikely that anyone would recognise him, yet they didn't dare take the chance. He’d been one of the most famous people in the world, after all. Now, he was the prime alien target – and, if they caught him, he would be brainwashed.
Another explosion billowed up in the distance, casting an eerie light over the town.
“Coming,” he said. He clutched his pistol tightly, watching for aliens or their collaborators as he started to move. “Let's go.”
***
Nancy didn't know what he’d done, Greg knew. The alien collaborators had interrogated her, but they’d been surprisingly gentle with both of them. It was the reward for collaboration, Greg suspected – and he was a collaborator. He might not fight for the monsters, yet he’d collaborated. There was no avoiding that simple fact.
He wished with all his heart that Nicolas had never shown up at his house, requesting sanctuary; the bastard, Nancy’s true father, had knowingly put his daughter’s life in terrible danger. Greg knew what the aliens would do to Nancy if they caught Nicolas living there – and the longer he stayed, the greater the chance of capture. The aliens monitored everything; if Greg started to buy more food, they’d know ... and they’d start asking why. Their collaborators had caught several women housing refugee children just by looking at their shopping records.
And if he’d hesitated, they would have asked him why ...
He’d had no choice, he told himself, time and time again. Nicolas couldn't stay – and if the aliens discovered that he’d hidden him, Nancy would be at their mercy. Perhaps they would give her to someone else to raise, or perhaps they would throw her to the Order Police’s more perverted members. There had been no choice.
But that didn't stop him feeling guilty, or horrified at what he’d done.
No one else knew what had really happened. The aliens and the Order Police did raid houses from time to time, either because they had suspicions or because they were simply bored. No one knew that he’d become a collaborator, or that he’d betrayed a member of the resistance. But he couldn't help imagining, as he lay in bed, that they did know, that they were merely biding their time until they could do him in. He wouldn't mind if it was him alone – God knew he deserved no less – but what if they killed Nancy too?
He’d collaborated. And now he was alone and friendless and scared.
The sound of shooting woke him up from a fitful sleep and he threw himself out of bed automatically, then crawled out of the room and into Nancy’s bedroom. The little girl – not so little any longer, he told himself, because she’d seen her father taken away and her stepfather exposed as helpless – had done as she had been told; she’d rolled out of bed too and dropped to the floor.
“Come here,” he hissed. “Hurry.”
Nancy crawled over to him, her eyes clearly nervous. She was taking it much better than he had, part of his mind noted. It must have been Nicolas’s genes showing up in her. If half of the SEAL’s stories were true, he was practically a superman; brave, fearless and utterly implacable. And now, at best, he was a POW. And it was Greg’s fault.
“Daddy?” Nancy asked. “What’s happening?”
Greg winced. “I don’t know, sweetheart,” he said. It sounded like World War Three had broken out in Mannington. “I just don’t know.”
***
Nicolas peered through his NVGs as the attack proceeded, wishing that he could get closer and actually tear into the aliens himself. But it wasn't a possibility, something that had been made clear to him when he’d volunteered. He simply knew too much to be allowed to risk his life, at least until they developed a permanent countermeasure to alien implantation. Instead, all he could do was watch and wait.
The aliens, assuming they thought like humans, would have seen a major attack developing from the north, attacking every checkpoint and garrison in the area. There were other attacks being mounted against other towns, although Mannington had come in for special attention. Nicolas wasn't happy about that, because it ensured that the aliens would have their suspicions that the Mannington attack was key to the overall plan, but there was no choice. They had to suppress all of the enemy forces within the town.
There was a faint buzz from the radio, followed by a line of gibberish. “Charlie, Bateman, Hillocks, Hello Jimmy.”
“Good,” Nicolas muttered.
He scowled. The aliens could crack normal human encryption codes – and, given the right technology, they might even be able to crack book-based codes – but they would have no way of knowing what the words meant, even if they had been sent in the clear. They were encrypted, on the off-chance that the aliens would find the gibberish and decide it couldn’t possibly be the answer. Nicolas had his doubts – a simple dictionary would tell them that they’d found real words – but it was worth a try.
The plan seemed to be working, which bothered him. Common sense suggested that if the enemy were attacking, it was wise to send reinforcements – and there were reinforcements, stationed at the checkpoints to the south of Mannington. But the attack might have been a division, or the CO might have been killed, or someone would decide just to sit on their asses and do nothing. Fighting the Order Police was always tricky, if only because it was hard to predict what the amateurs might do.
But they were doing exactly what they were supposed to do ...
***
The President froze as a line of men carrying torches ran through Mannington, heading towards the north of the town. It was clear that they were reinforcements drawn away from the south, rather than patrollers looking for runaway Presidents, but that didn't stop them being dangerous. He hid in the shadows and silently prayed for their safe escape as the Order Policeman ran past, towards the shooting. Once they were gone, Pepper led him onwards.
“Not safe yet, sir,” she muttered, as they reached the outskirts of the city. “We have to get through the checkpoint without being stopped.”
***
Olli – who hadn’t been called anything else since he’d joined the Rangers – held his breath as he crawled up towards the checkpoint. For Order Policemen who had been fighting insurgents who would do literally anything to kill them, they were remarkably lax about security; it didn't seem to have occurred to them that someone might attack their position from the side. The three Order Policemen outside the checkpoint were peering into the darkness, while the ones inside the small building seemed to be trying to ignore the noise as their comrades came under attack.
He unhooked the grenade from his belt and hurled it into the building. The idiots hadn't even thought to put railings on their windows when they wanted some fresh air! There were shouts, followed by an explosion that would have killed or maimed everyone in the building – and frightened hell out of the ones on the outside. Olli would have preferred to use his knife to deal with them, but there was no time. As he came around the building, he shot the first one through the head and the second one through the chest. The third threw himself on the ground and begged for mercy.
“Get fucked,” Olli said.
The Order Policeman had no time to react before Olli shot him too.
***
“Clear,” Pepper muttered. “Now, run!”
The President obeyed, feeling the blood pumping through his veins as he ran towards the checkpoint and the single man wh
o’d taken out the guards. He saw the man’s eyes widen in recognition before he nodded to Pepper and then pointed towards a road that led away from Mannington. The President smiled, but he kept running, ruefully aware that either of them wouldn't hesitate to kick him if he didn't run fast enough. It wasn't career suicide if there was no other choice.
A small group of men waited under the trees to meet him. “Mr. President,” the leader said. “It’s good to see you again.”
The President had always had a good memory for faces, but he found it impossible to place the man standing in front of him. But then, he’d darkened his face to make it harder for anyone to see. His own mother probably wouldn't have recognised him.
“Thank you,” the President said, instead. “What now?”
“We run,” the man said.
They set a punishing pace, but the President found it hard to care. He was free!
***
“Stay in your homes,” the loudspeaker bellowed. “Stay off the streets. Anyone found outside will be arrested and detained. Stay in your homes.”
Greg shivered as he saw the sun slowly rising up above Mannington, illuminating the troubled town. There was no visible damage, as far as he could see from his windows, but something had clearly happened last night. The Order Policemen who were patrolling the streets looked nervous, jumpy enough to fire at shadows. And several alien craft were hanging overhead, just daring the population to try something.
He shook his head as he looked over at where Nancy was sleeping. The corner had seemed the safest place for her, even before he’d positioned furniture to provide some degree of protection for her frail form. It had been hard to resist the temptation just to join her and cower in the corner until they both starved, but there was no choice. Someone had to fix them breakfast.
“At least I don’t have a job anymore,” he muttered to himself. The tasteless slop the aliens provided was free – and it was worth every cent. “I don’t have to leave Nancy alone.”
Outside Context Problem: Book 03 - The Slightest Hope of Victory Page 9