by D. J. Molles
He hadn’t slept. Knew he wouldn’t sleep now.
His face felt drawn and lifeless. He sorely wished that they had some source of caffeine, but that was a luxury from another time.
Lieutenant Derrick, who had been one of Fort Bragg’s Watch Commanders, stood to his side. He was reprising his role, but now here in Butler instead. Watch Command was responsible for the guarding of the Safe Zone, and typically wasn’t present in the TOC where the Hunter-Killer operations were controlled, but this was something of an all hands on deck situation.
“Sir,” Derrick said in an undertone. “You want me to send a runner to wake President Houston?”
Carl considered it for a moment, then shook his head. “No, not yet.” He knew which way she would start to swing decisions. He preferred not to have her muddying the waters yet. “But I do want you to call in Major Brinly. We might need his Marines.”
Lieutenant Derrick nodded. “Yes, sir. I’ll send a runner immediately.”
Carl crossed his arms over his chest, and set his right fist against his mouth.
Hamrick, standing over their on-duty TOC operator, turned and looked at him.
They said nothing, but they didn’t need to. Their eyes spoke volumes to each other.
They’d made a mistake.
That much was clear.
How big of a mistake?
Well, that remained to be seen.
TWENTY-ONE
─▬▬▬─
THOUSANDS
It was roughly a hundred and fifty miles to Checkpoint Joker from the Butler Safe Zone.
Two hours and some change, at the Humvee’s top speed of 70 mph.
An agonizing two hours, marked every ten minutes, by command transmitting into the dead silence: “Any member of Squad One, Alpha Squad, this is command. Please respond. Over.”
“We’re getting close,” Billings called out. “Pickell, get on the fifty.”
Pickell clambered up into the turret.
Again, command tried to hail Alpha Squad. And again, they got no response.
At least, not for a long few minutes.
And then, as Sam turned away from the radio, knowing that Paige and his team weren’t going to respond, like they hadn’t responded every other time, the radio crackled.
It was just an open line. It lasted for maybe three seconds.
Billings leaned forward.
Everyone in the Humvee—except Pickell, who couldn’t hear from the turret—refocused on the radio.
“Did you hear that?” Jones murmured, nearly hanging over Billings’s shoulder.
“Yeah, I heard it.”
“Was that command or Squad One?” Jones demanded.
“I don’t know, Jones,” Billings snapped. “I heard what you heard.”
The radio opened again.
“Command to the last station transmitting, we did not copy. Please re-transmit. Over.”
Silence again.
It drew out for nearly a minute, the TOC operator and whoever was hanging over their head trying to give whoever it was that had transmitted ample time to respond. Then the operator tried again.
“Command to last transmitting station, if you cannot advise verbally, click comms twice to acknowledge.”
This time the response was almost immediate.
But it wasn’t two clicks.
The channel opened again. A low hiss. An open line.
And then a low voice, barely more than a whisper.
It made a noise that might’ve been a word, or might’ve been a groan.
A slurred consonant, followed by a protracted exhale.
And then the transmission ended.
“What was that?” Jones said. “What did they say?”
“It sounded like ‘no,’” Chris said, from the driver’s seat.
“Everyone shut up,” Billings snapped, holding up a hand.
“Command to last calling station, please repeat. We did not copy. Squad One, is that you?”
But whoever it was didn’t repeat themselves.
Through the darkness ahead of them, Sam caught sight of a glimmering collection of vehicle running lights, drawing closer.
“Checkpoint Joker,” Chris announced, as they approached it.
Checkpoint Joker was the furthest and most southerly checkpoint from Augusta. It was an old towing company with an attached impound lot. Again, selected for its relative defensibility, though if Sam were to take a guess, the eight-foot-high barbed wire fences weren’t going to stop a thousand primals.
Probably not even a hundred of them.
In amongst a collection of old, impounded vehicles, the technicals, Humvees, and MATVs of the Hunter-Killer squads gathered, their headlights off to prevent blinding themselves, but their running lights on.
Squad Two—Snake Eyes—had taken up security at the main gate of the impound lot, their vehicle positioned right in the middle of the gate so that any incoming vehicle had to slow significantly and carefully sidle around the narrow space they’d left to either side.
Their gunner tracked the incoming vehicles for a moment, but then lifted the barrel when he recognized them. Two other members of the squad stood out front of the vehicle, waving in the last of the QRF, followed by Billings’s Humvee.
The second that Chris rolled them to a halt, Billings grabbed the radio receiver and made a very brief transmission, obviously not wanting to step on anything else that might be radioed in from whoever that was trying to speak only moments ago.
“Command, command, go to secondary.”
Billings didn’t wait for a response. He switched the radio over.
“Alfred on secondary. Go ahead last calling station.”
“Alfred, this is Squad Four Actual,” Billings’ eyes scanned around and behind them through the Humvee windows, apparently taking a mental count of all the squads. “Responding teams have all arrived here at Checkpoint Joker. We’re standing by for orders. Over.”
A long pause ensued over the radio.
A rap on Billings’s window drew his attention. He dropped the reinforced glass.
Sergeant Roble from Squad Eight—Wardogs—stood outside, looking antsy. “Did you hear that last transmission? Was that Paige?”
Billings shook his head. “I have no clue who that was. Could’ve been nothing.”
Roble made a “Pshuh” noise that one might have expected more from a petulant teenager than a soldier in full battle rattle. “It wasn’t nothing, Billings. That was someone saying something.”
“It sounded like ‘no’,” Chris repeated.
“That’s what I thought, too,” Roble agreed.
Sam had heard something else, but he kept that to himself for now.
“Sergeant Billings,” Hamrick came back on the line, all business. “That last transmission had to’ve come from Squad One’s vehicle. Last known location of their vehicle was in center city. If we’ve got live soldiers out there, we need to at least make an attempt at contact. I want you to slip in as close as you can get, and just see if you can get eyes on that vehicle and report what you see. Over.”
Billings stared at the radio. “I can’t tell whether this is punishment for making him look bad, or his way of apologizing.” But he keyed the radio. “Wilco, first sern’t. Proceed towards Augusta and see if we can’t get eyes on Squad One’s MATV.”
Another voice came over the comms this time. Master Sergeant Gilliard’s. “Sergeant Billings, take two other squads with you. And remember this is recon only. If you can get eyes on without getting yourself hemmed up, then great, but use your good judgement and pull back if you need to. We’re not going to lose any more squads tonight.”
Sam felt a slight easing in the tension of his guts. Hearing the command from Gilliard took a bit of the sting out of it. This wasn’t punishment—Gilliard trusted them not to make a stupid, hazardous decision and put more people in jeopardy.
“Roger that, master sern’t,” Billings responded, then looked to Roble.
> Roble nodded without hesitation.
Billings transmitted again: “Squad Eight, Wardogs, will come with…”
“Andy’ll come too,” Roble asserted. “Put the Metalmouths on there.”
“…As well as Squad Five, Metalmouths. Over.”
Hamrick’s voice again: “Command copies. Get it done, Sergeant Billings. Out.”
***
In the strange twilight of dreams that existed between waning sedation and consciousness, Loudermouth thought that she was there, standing over him again.
He felt terror, making his heart thrash.
But he also felt a low, pulsing warmth, in the bottom of himself.
Everything was indistinct.
The details were shadowed by fear and drugs, but he knew in that moment what he’d known then: She was not like the others. She was not deformed, not terrible. But she was also not entirely human.
He saw every curve of her naked flesh. Arms, corded like an athlete’s—but not long and ape-like. Hands that were long-fingered and callused, but not clawed. Not like the others. Breasts, full and young. Thighs, powerfully muscled, but sleek, a dark thatch of hair between them. A face that was not inhuman, shrouded by lengths of dark, dreadlocked hair, with eyes peering out, as cold and violent as a lioness.
Strange and terrifying, and yet powerfully feminine.
Fear and hatred, and a very real, very conscious desire to either flee or to try to kill her, and yet he was powerless to do either. And as she crawled toward him with a liquid sort of movement, and drew herself over him, and mounted him, despite it all, some base part of himself rose to her, hard and hot.
She smelled like a wild animal. Her skin hot, like a fire burned beneath it. He felt her heat pressing down against him and despite the agony in his broken hips, despite his logical mind screaming and rebelling, he felt himself pressing back.
Hands as hard as iron gripped his face.
He met her terrible eyes, and he hated them and wanted to shoot them out of her skull, and somehow, in a swirl of something deeper than all of that, he wanted them.
She growled a single word from a mouth not entirely human, and not entirely primal.
“Go!”
***
Loudermouth reeled back into reality with a yelp.
For a second, he thought that she was still there.
He tried to lurch away, but he was immobilized.
“Easy,” a soft voice said.
Not the same voice. Not the growl.
Loudermouth’s wide eyes, still seeing half of his dream mixed with reality, blinked a few times until the horrible fiction of his imagination slipped away, like rain off a windshield.
A woman in scrubs looked down at him. “Sergeant Loudermouth,” she said. “You’re okay. You’re in the Butler Safe Zone. You’re safe.”
Relatively safe, his mind shot out, almost as a reflex.
His eyes surged down towards his body. He saw that his hips were in something of a cast, irons pins going through them like a torture device. His arms weren’t in casts, but they lay, limp and throbbing ominously at his side.
He tried to move. Managed to curl his hands into fists, and make his feet wiggle.
“Don’t move too much,” the lady in the scrubs told him. “We’ve put your shoulders back in their sockets, and pinned your hips back together, but the more you move, the less you’ll heal. So try to stay still as much as you can.”
Still staring at his casted lower body, Loudermouth’s mind began to run, began to shake off the dregs of the drugs they must’ve given him. He began to parse through the real and the fantastical. What he had stored in his memories, and how they’d been mixed into a mess by the dream.
Some of that had happened.
Some of it hadn’t.
He couldn’t recall anything sexual about the moment that he’d seen her. But his recollection of her, he felt, was accurate. And even now, the vestiges of the dream had tainted it with that bestial eroticism. He felt the otherworldly burn, low in himself, and was disgusted with it.
He’d been too scared when he’d seen her in real life for any of the shit in his dream to have really happened.
But he’d dreamed that it had.
And that disturbed him.
Christ, I’m fucked in the head.
But there was more to it than that. And he knew it. And he left it there, and made an unconscious promise to himself that it would remain there, buried.
He dragged his eyes back to the nurse, the real world taking hold of his thoughts again. “Have they pulled out of Augusta?” he croaked. His throat was dry and barren. “Where is everybody?”
The nurse only shook her head. “I don’t know about that stuff, Honey. I’m just a nurse.”
If he could’ve reached out and seized her, he would’ve. But all he could do was make his tone forceful.
“Nurse, I’m not fucking around. You need to get me someone in charge. First Sergeant Hamrick, or Master Sergeant Gilliard. Someone.”
The nurse seemed on the cusp of saying something along the lines of “No, you need to rest,” but after a moment she appeared to relent.
“I’ll get Doctor Trent, okay?”
And before he could argue with her, she’d hustled out of the room.
***
The sky blanched gray to the east.
Sam could see the individual trees now, as their Humvee approached Augusta. They’d passed Checkpoint Scarecrow a minute ago, and the road ahead of them rose up, and Sam knew that this was the bridge over the I-520 loop.
Billings shifted about in the front seat. “Guys, I’m going to do something unusual.”
His team listened. No one spoke.
“Chris, go ahead and pull us to a stop. Right here.”
Their Humvee rolled to a halt, the brakes squeaking. Behind them, the rumble of the two other squads’ vehicles shifted to an idle as they stopped behind them.
Billings keyed the squad comms on his rig. “Billings to Roble and Andy, keep your men in the vehicles. But I’m going to dismount. Clear the sides of this bridge and make sure there are no surprises. How copy?”
Roble answered up, some hesitation in his voice. “Sure, Billings. We copy.”
Billings pushed his door open. “Pickell, stay sharp on that fiddy. Jones and Ryder, you’re with me.”
Sam unlatched his door and slid out into the world. His feet tingled in his boots as they supported his weight after so long cramped in the back of the vehicle. The cool morning air surrounded him, still and silent.
Not even the birds had woken up yet.
He stepped to the front of the Humvee, where Billings and Jones stood.
Billings indicated the sides of the bridge with a knife hand. “Sam, you take the left, Jones you take the right. The second you see anything moving, you call it out and get back in the truck.”
“Hua,” Jones murmured, his usual spirits subdued.
Sam simply nodded his acknowledgement.
Then he moved to the side of the bridge.
Jones moved to the opposite side.
Billings started walking.
The vehicles behind them eased forward.
Sam’s pulse was hard, but not particularly fast. He sidled up to the concrete barrier to the left side of the bridge. He held his breath and peered over.
He almost expected a face to be staring up at him from below, all fury and gnashing teeth.
But below him, it was too dark to see.
He forced his feet to keep moving.
He angled his rifle up and over, thumbing his weaponlight on.
The beam blazed down below him.
Just brush, at first. The leaves of it reflecting the light back at him. The shadows created by the weaponlight shifted ominously, but there was nothing in them. Only shadows.
Sam continued to move forward, sweeping his light back and forth.
A hissing noise sounded, very close by.
Sam’s heart shot into his throat,
and he almost called out, until he realized it was just his rig, brushing up against the concrete barriers.
Shit. Calm down, Sam.
They moved onwards and upwards. The bridge had a slight grade to it. The top seemed like a horizon line, beyond which Sam saw the tips of buildings in the downtown area, charcoal gray against a navy sky.
He approached the top, his attention now split between looking over the side, and continuously checking the horizon line as it seemed to gradually sink before him, revealing more and more of the city.
What would he see from the top of the overpass?
Thousands of primals, waiting for them?
Back over the side. Another sweep of his weaponlight.
About twenty-five feet below them, the beam played weakly over a collection of defunct vehicles, some of them standing askew in the middle of the lanes of I-520, most of them shoved off to the side. The remnants of a traffic jam from long ago. People trying to flee the city as everything went to shit.
They seemed so ancient where they stood, rusting and moldering, in lanes sometimes half overtaken by the encroachment of scrub brush. Every one of these scenes felt like finding archaeological relics of a civilization that time forgot.
A civilization that was dead.
A low whistle caught Sam’s attention.
His eyes went to Billings, and saw that his sergeant stood at the apex of the overpass now, his fist raised over his head, indicating a halt.
The vehicles stopped moving forward.
Sam and Jones hustled forward, so that they also stood at the top of the slight grade.
The city of Augusta, Georgia, laid out in front of them. Sam could see the rest of the overpass, descending down into the dimness. His eyes scanned through the halflight, looking for any sign of movement.
Sam and Jones converged on Billings.
Billings had a pair of large field binoculars that he’d rummaged from the back of the Humvee. He held them at chest height, his rifle hanging on its sling. He pivoted in place, seeming to orient himself.
“Alpha Squad should be straight in that city center,” he mused aloud.
Appearing to have settled on the appropriate direction to begin searching, Billings raised the binoculars to his eyes.