Rogue Star_Frozen Earth_Post-Apocalyptic Technothriller

by Jasper T. Scott

  “What? What is it?” I asked, my eyes darting between them.

  “How the hell are you still alive?” Harry asked.

  Chapter 34

  I went straight to the bathroom to check myself in the mirror.

  “Logan, wait!” Kate called after me. “Let me help you down the stairs.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  At the sound of our voices, Rachel came running from the living room. “Daddy!”

  Alex trailed behind her at a more reserved pace. Rachel stopped abruptly, and horror flashed in her eyes when she saw me. Her mouth popped open and she screamed before turning and running back the other way. Harry’s wife, Deborah, emerged from the living room as well. She and Alex stood off at a distance in the hallway, staring at me like I was some kind of monster.

  Fearing that might actually be the case, I darted into the bathroom and hit the lights. My mind instantly rejected the face in the mirror. I stood blinking in confusion at my own reflection. My entire face was stained red. Chunks of clotted blood were stuck in my beard and hair. Sparkling bits of glass pocked my cheeks, and one and two-inch-long splinters protruded like spikes from a dozen different places. My coat was shredded and drenched with blood, dark red stuffing oozing out everywhere.

  Kate caught up to me in the bathroom. “Where did all the blood come from?” she asked.

  I turned to her with a grimace. “Not mine,” I said simply.

  “But you are hurt,” Kate said.

  I nodded, wincing as the full measure of those hurts hit me for the first time. Now that we were safe, at least for the time being, my brain was free to nag me about all the niggling injuries I’d sustained—and the not-so-niggling gash in my shoulder.

  “I need you to get undressed,” Kate said, looking me over once more.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  She pointed over my shoulder. “Get in the shower. I’ll be back.”

  I stripped down, peeling away layer after layer until I was naked and shivering. I went to stand in the shower, and Kate came back with the first-aid kit. She opened it on top of the toilet. It was the size of a toolbox. Taking out a sheet of gauze, she doused it in rubbing alcohol and turned to me.

  “This is going to hurt,” Kate said. Finding a concentration of a dozen minor cuts on my chest and stomach, she wiped the gauze over them. Alcohol seeped in and trickled down my front. I screamed and slapped the wall. But I’d forgotten about my shoulder. The resulting flash of pain from that injury put me on my ass in the shower.

  “Logan! Are you okay?” I nodded and leaned my head back, feeling sick and light-headed. “Maybe I’d better stay seated.”

  Kate nodded and quietly went about cleaning my cuts. The puncture wound in my leg was deep and had already clotted, so I told her not to bother. There was no way to sterilize it after the fact. When Kate got to my face she had to use a pair of tweezers to remove the splinters and the bigger chunks of glass. Seeing how bloody the sheet of gauze already was, she laid it aside and soaked a hand towel with alcohol instead.

  “Close your eyes.” I did as I was told and gritted my teeth against the searing pain that erupted as she wiped the towel all over my face. When she was done, the towel had turned bright red.

  Kate moved on to my shoulder next, checking the bullet wound there. The blood had dried and mostly clotted, staunching the flow, but as she cleaned it, hot rivers poured down my back and side. Fortunately the bullet had mostly missed, so it wasn’t as bad as it looked. Tears dripped down Kate’s cheeks as she cleaned the wound.

  “How did this happen?” she asked, shaking her head.

  “Which part?”

  “All of it!”

  Deciding to skip over Harry’s part in things for now, I went on to explain about Duncan and the alien tank; then I related what he’d told me about the invaders.

  Kate wrapped my shoulder tight with gauze, and then sat back on her haunches to wipe her cheeks. I reached out with a shaking hand to help, but ended up smearing her face with blood.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “This doesn’t seem real,” she said. “How can this be happening?”

  I heaved a sigh and shook my head. I didn’t have any answers. A violent shiver tore through me, drawing a cascade of protests from my battered body. “Could you get me some clothes? It’s freezing in here.”

  Kate shook her head. “Not yet.” She grabbed her tweezers and scooted forward to set to work on my face, picking out all the smaller bits of glass. We must have spent an hour like that, with her picking and poking at my face and neck. I was too tired and weak to say much, and she was too focused on the task at hand. About halfway through the process Alex poked his head in.

  “Dad?”

  “Go to your room, Alex!” Kate snapped.

  He retreated hurriedly, and I scowled. Wondering what kind of punishment was called for, and how to punish him when he had so little to begin with. This was all his fault—his and Harry’s. They were both loose cannons as far as I was concerned, but in Alex’s case, this was the second time that he’d gotten us into trouble because of his connection with the Hartfords, or rather, because of his connection with Celine.

  When Kate finished, she helped me to take a shower—hot, thankfully—to wash away the rest of the blood. She stood in the shower with me, fully clothed, and heedless of how wet her clothes and hair were getting. We had to be careful not to get my shoulder dressing wet, but all of my other injuries were minor enough that it didn’t matter—except for the puncture wound in my leg. It began bleeding again. That put an end to the shower. Kate ushered me out and dried me with a towel before setting to work dressing my leg with alcohol and more gauze. When she was done, she handed me a pill and filled a glass of water from the sink. I eyed the pill speculatively.

  “Antibiotics,” she explained. “It’s that or an injection.”

  I took the pill and gulped water from the glass, only then realizing how thirsty I was.

  “I’ll get you some clothes. Hold on.”

  Shivering again, I was so weak that I had to sit on the toilet to not fall over while I waited for Kate to return. She came back a minute later with fresh clothes and helped me to get dressed. Finally, Kate led me out into the living room and eased me down into an armchair. I noticed the clock on the wall showed that it was half past midnight.

  “I’ll be right back. I need to go change into something dry,” Kate said.

  The Hartfords sat huddled together, staring vacantly into the darkened vault of Richard’s wood stove. There was another one at the other end of the shelter, beneath the spiral staircase.

  “We should light that fire,” Harry said.

  I just looked at him. He figured out why a second later. “Oh, right. They’re heat seekers.”

  I nodded and looked away, searching for my kids. Alex, miraculously, must have listened to his mother and retreated to his room. Rachel was also nowhere to be seen. “Rachie?” I called.

  A door opened, and I heard the pitter-patter of hurried footfalls. Finding me in the chair, and no longer drenched in blood like some primordial monster, she launched herself into my lap. I had to bite my tongue not to cry out from the pain. A tear leaked from the corner of my eye, but I smiled and kissed Rachel’s head as she hugged me tight.

  “You’re not dead?” she asked, her voice muffled by the sweater my wife had helped me put on.

  I shook my head, smiling ruefully. “No, honey. I’m okay.” I stroked her hair, taking a slow, deep breath and letting it out in a sigh. Kate returned a minute later. Seeing me and Rachel sitting there, she smiled fondly at us and went to sit in the other armchair across the wooden chest that served as a coffee table.

  No one spoke for a long moment. Harry looked somehow smaller now, sitting between his wife and daughter, his arms draped over their shoulders like a blanket. The look on his face was equal parts horror and shock.

  “Harry,” I said quietly, aware that Rachel was well on her way to sleep.
/>   He looked at me, eyebrows raised.

  “I need you to tell me everything you know about the Screechers. You were watching the news when they came, right?”

  “We were listening to it on the radio. I thought that guy you ran into already told you what happened.”

  “Maybe there was some detail he missed, or something that I didn’t pay proper attention to at the time. What I really need to know is, what are they after? Are they just evicting us from all the warmer regions, or are they trying to exterminate us as well?”

  Rachel looked up from my chest to regard me sleepily. “Exterminate? What does that mean? What are Screechers?”

  “Shhh. Nothing honey. Go back to sleep.”

  She buried her face in my sweater again, and I nodded to Harry. “So?”

  “You just said it. They’re kicking us out, and we’re resisting.”

  I considered that, and thought back over everything I’d seen tonight, trying to answer my own questions. “That Screecher that you took out was willing to leave us alone after we laid down our guns. I think that says more about their intentions than anything. It’s like what we did in Venezuela. We invaded because we needed their land, and all the people who died defending their country died because they refused to give it up without a fight. They were collateral damage, not the target.”

  “So...” Harry shook his head. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that we need to take our supplies and head back up north—peacefully—before we become collateral damage.”

  Chapter 35

  “Leave? We just got here!” Deborah Hartford said.

  Kate was watching me with big eyes and shaking her head. “We’ll freeze to death, or starve. At least here we have power, heat, gas, and food... Richard didn’t build this place for nothing. Without it we won’t last long.”

  “And how long do you think we’ll last against the Screechers?” I countered. “A few seconds, maybe, while they cut through the front door.”

  Harry shook his head. “You can leave if you want, but we’re staying. If the Screechers are so peaceful, then I’ll wait for them to come and evict us peacefully. Leaving now versus then shouldn’t make much difference if they’re not actually trying to kill us.”

  “He’s right,” Kate said. “Besides, it’s a war zone out there. The best way to avoid becoming collateral damage is to keep our heads down and wait for the fighting to end.”

  I was about to mention Haven Colony as a potential destination, but then I remembered Massey’s warnings about not sharing the knowledge of Haven’s existence with anyone. Besides, we didn’t even know where Haven was, let alone how to get there, and Richard had never called. My eyes found the clock. It was twelve forty-five. Had Kate been listening to the radio while we were gone? Before we’d been interrupted by the sounds of war bleeding through our radio, we’d still had a few hours of listening to go before we were supposed to give up on hearing from Richard.

  My thoughts circled back to the explanation I’d given myself for his silence: he couldn’t afford to send a message now. The Screechers would trace the signal and find Haven.

  But did that mean that Richard had given us up for dead, or would he try to contact us later? My eyes found Kate’s, and I nodded, coming to a decision.

  “We’ll stay here for now, and keep listening to the radio in case things change out there.”

  Kate nodded back. Richard would find a way to contact us. If not... my thoughts went to the rendezvous Richard and Akron had set for us. We were supposed to meet up at Starcast’s launch facility in Memphis. There, the same plane that had brought Akron Massey and his family over from Haven Colony would be waiting to fly us back to whatever boat or helicopter would take us the rest of the way.

  “It’s late. We should get some sleep,” I said.

  “Where are we going to sleep?” Harry asked.

  I pointed to the couch that he and his family were sitting on. “It’s a pull-out.”

  Harry grimaced, but said, “Thank you.”

  It would be a tight squeeze with all three of them, but right now comfort was a secondary concern. They were lucky just to be alive.

  * * *

  —THE FOLLOWING MORNING—

  April 26th

  6 DAYS BEFORE THE ROGUE’S ARRIVAL

  I sat at the top of the tower, wearing gloves and a parka along with one of Richard’s winter coats, since mine was now shredded, blood-soaked, and in the garbage. Kate was downstairs trying to use the radio to reach Richard, while the Hartfords and my kids slept in.

  I watched the rosy hues of dawn gradually transition to fiery reds with the rising sun. Frost sparkled on the grass below and in the skeletal tops of the trees around the compound. I blinked in shock, and shivered, realizing for the first time that the trees were losing their leaves. Our tower and the surrounding compound would be visible now—a beacon drawing the huddled masses to us, or worse, the Screechers.

  I breathed out a sigh and my breath turned to clouds as I exhaled. Reaching for the thermos of coffee beside me, I popped open the spout and took a sip. The chill in my bones retreated somewhat.

  I grabbed my binoculars next. They were sitting beside the scoped rifle I’d brought up from the armory. I pressed the binoculars to my eyes and gazed through the crooked fingers of half-naked branches to the rooftops of the houses in Lakeview Ranch. They all looked to be intact. I breathed another sigh. Maybe the Screechers weren’t hell-bent on wanton destruction.

  But even as I thought that, my gaze wandered, and I found no less than a dozen thin white tendrils of smoke rising in the distance. My eyes tracked right, out over Calaveras Lake to San Antonio, and I gasped. Dozens more columns of smoke were rising there—dark and angry, and feeding into a churning black cloud that looked like it had erupted from a volcano. Even from this distance I could see bright orange flames flickering through the black. The city was burning.

  I tracked my eyes back the other way, and this time I noticed the massive towers rising out of ranchers’ fields on the outskirts of the city. Each of them was like a gleaming mirror. Those landers looked far more familiar than alien. I wondered how they compared with Starcast’s landers for the Mars mission.

  Muffled footsteps came clomping up the stairs behind me, followed by a metallic squawk as the hatch opened. I turned to see Harry standing there with the hatch propped open on his back. “Brr! It’s freezing out here!”

  “Yeah, pretty chilly.” I could feel warm air wafting out from the open hatch. The in-floor electric heating was set with a timer to come on at sunrise, just as soon as our solar panels could handle the extra power draw. “What’s up?” I asked.

  “No sign of the Screechers?”

  “None,” I confirmed, shaking my head. That was the first thing I’d checked for when I came out. I was still on the lookout for them, but the skies were clear, and the surrounding area was free of the four-legged tanks and their smaller cousins that we’d encountered last night.

  Harry propped the hatch open and crawled out beside me to look for himself. He kneeled in front of the low wall around the roof and gaped at the sight of San Antonio.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Deep shit.”

  Harry shivered and hugged his shoulders, rubbing them vigorously; then he rubbed his hands together and blew into them. “Damn it’s cold. I’m going back downstairs.”

  Before he could leave, more footsteps sounded on the stairs. We both turned.

  The sound of my wife’s voice preceded her—“Logan!”

  The urgency in her voice set my heart pounding at once. “What’s wrong?”

  She rose into view. As our eyes met, she stopped and leaned heavily on the railing to catch her breath. “The radio.”

  “Richard?”

  “No, I couldn’t reach him.”

  “Then—”

  “I tried scanning for a news station. I found one. Apparently we surrendered last night,” she said.<
br />
  “What? That fast?” Harry demanded.

  Kate nodded slowly. “The Screechers took out Washington, New York, and a handful of other major cities.”

  I gaped at her. “With what? Nukes?”

  She shook her head. “Something even more powerful, I think. Whatever it was, we surrendered before they could use it again.”

  “You got all of that in just a few minutes?” I asked. “What about Richard? You need to get back down there and listen.”

  Kate held up a hand. “The Mars Mission is leaving in a week.”

  “What? They’re still planning to leave with aliens in the sky waiting to shoot them down?”

  She shook her head. “None of them landed north of Mississippi.”

  “Then how did they hit DC?” Harry asked.

  “They launched a missile from somewhere in Florida. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We’ve surrendered, and they’re not attacking us anymore.”

  Harry rubbed his hands together and blew into them again. “Well, now what? We just roll over and freeze to death?”

  Kate looked at me. “I think it’s time to tell them about Haven.”

  I gave her a warning look, but it was too late. Harry’s gaze found me. “What’s Haven?”

  Kate replied before I could: “Somewhere that we’ll be safe, where the Screechers won’t find us.”

  “Haven...” Harry trailed off, shaking his head. “If it’s so safe, why aren’t you already there?”

  “Because we don’t know where it is, and we were waiting for an invitation. My brother-in-law was supposed to call us on the radio so that we could meet him in Memphis and go from there.”

  Harry arched an eyebrow at me. “Isn’t that where our rockets are launching from? I’m guessing that’s not a coincidence.”

  I shook my head and explained about Akron Massey’s involvement and the deal he’d cut with us and Richard. By the time I was done, Harry’s lips had turned blue from the cold, and even Kate was shivering.

  Harry looked skeptical. “So you think a survivalist billionaire would risk leaving Haven in the middle of an alien invasion?”