Rogue Star_Frozen Earth_Post-Apocalyptic Technothriller

by Jasper T. Scott

  I took a moment to consider that, taking into account what I knew of Massey and his previously-stated goal of escaping to Mars. “Yes,” I decided. “Especially now that the Screechers have stopped attacking us.”

  “And we know exactly where to find him,” Kate said. “Maybe Richard can’t tell us where Haven is, but we can go to Memphis and ask Mr. Massey for directions.”

  Chapter 36

  We all gathered in the living room to discuss our options. The adults sat around the dining table while the kids lounged on the couch. From where I sat, I could see Alex sitting beside Celine, her head resting on his shoulder, and Rachel curling up on the other side of him. I frowned and looked away. Alex and I hadn’t said a word to each other since last night. I was still waiting for an apology, but perhaps a spontaneous apology was too much to hope for with a teenager.

  “How the hell are we supposed to get from here to Memphis in a week?” Harry asked.

  “We have Richard’s truck,” Kate said.

  I nodded. “And plenty of diesel in storage. We’ll have to find a way to load spare fuel in the back, but we should be able to make it. It can’t be more than a day’s drive from here to Memphis.”

  Harry grunted. “Under ideal conditions maybe. Not in the middle of some robot-driven exodus. You know how crowded the roads will be with everyone going North?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think there’s enough gas to go around. The pumps have been dry for months thanks to all of the people who relocated down here.”

  “Great, so we’ll find their vehicles abandoned in the middle of the road,” Harry said. “That’s even worse.”

  “We can go off-road to get around them. That’s the advantage of all-wheel drive.”

  “That won’t work in the snow. We’ll get stuck.”

  Harry made a good point there. If it was this cold outside San Antonio, it was bound to get a lot colder before we reached Memphis.

  “And what about the fact that there’s three of us and four of you? That’s seven people for a five-seater.”

  “I guess we’ll have to take turns sitting in the back,” I said.

  “We’ll freeze to death,” Harry replied.

  “We could cover the steel frame at the back with a tarp and use sleeping bags. That would be enough to keep us warm.”

  Harry frowned and shook his head. “It’s too risky. Best case we’re forced to turn back. Worst case, we freeze to death somewhere on the side of the road between here and Memphis.”

  Deborah began chewing her nails beside him, clearly overwrought just thinking about it.

  Kate turned to me, and I could see the resignation in her eyes. “Harry is right, but we’re going to have to leave sooner or later, and it’s only getting colder. By the time we’re forced to leave, things will be much worse.”

  I looked at Harry. “I don’t suppose you know how to fly a plane or a helicopter?”

  He shook his head.

  “You know anyone who can?”

  “You mean assuming we find one we can steal? Duncan was a pilot in Afghanistan,” he said. “But according to you, now he’s a puddle on my porch.”

  I grimaced. Great. “All right, let’s think out of the box for a minute....” Everyone waited for me to go on while I wracked my brain for answers. If the problem was running into obstacles on the road that we couldn’t go around, then the solution would involve removing those obstacles. I already knew from touring Richard’s compound what kind of equipment he had that could help us. “We can put chains on the tires,” I began. “And Richard has a tow bar and a winch on his truck. We can probably use those to move any obstacles we can’t go around.”

  “Suppose you find an obstacle that can’t be moved?” Harry asked.

  I looked him in the eye. “Harry. You and your family are welcome to stay here, but we’re leaving.”

  I could see the wheels turning in Harry’s head. He looked to his wife, and Deborah suddenly stopped biting her nails. “What do you think?”

  She slowly shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  Harry looked back to me. I secretly hoped he would take me up on my offer. After he’d gotten me shot with his recklessness, I wasn’t sure I trusted him not to do something else to compromise our safety.

  “You mind if we sleep on it?” Harry asked.

  I nodded. It would take at least a day to prepare for the trip, anyway. “On the condition that you help us prepare regardless.”

  “No problem. What do you need?”

  “Containers for fuel. Lots of them.”

  * * *

  —THREE HOURS LATER—

  April 12th

  “It’s not enough,” I said, shaking my head as I looked over the supply of diesel we’d packed into the back of Richard’s old Ford F350. By my calculations we needed at least fifty gallons of spare fuel. That meant ten five-gallon containers. We’d found three in the form of water cooler tanks and four more in the form of five-gallon jerry cans that Richard had in storage.

  “We’re out of containers,” Harry said, grabbing the steel frame rising from the truck bed and peering in.

  “What about your house?” I asked.

  Harry looked at me like I’d just lost my mind. “You want to go back there?”

  “We surrendered, so it should be safe. Besides, I didn’t see any Screechers out there earlier.”

  “You might have missed them.”

  “If they were out patrolling, then they should have found us here already.”

  Harry didn’t look happy. “I don’t know, Logan. I think it’s a bad idea.”

  “We’re going to be out there on the road soon enough, anyway. Better we find out how the Screechers react to us now than later—just don’t go shooting any of them this time.”

  “And what if they shoot us first?”

  “Duck.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “No, it’s not, but we have to risk it. It beats running out of fuel a hundred miles from Memphis and having to walk the rest of the way.”

  Harry sighed and grabbed his shotgun from where he’d left it leaning against the side of the truck. I took the AR15 he’d given me out of the back. Richard had better weapons, but I hadn’t shown Harry the armory yet, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to. If he was trigger happy with a pump-action shotgun, I didn’t want to know what he’d do with a fully-automatic assault rifle.

  I glanced back toward our compound, catching a glimpse through the trees of the chain-link fence and the guard tower. “Maybe we should go back and lock the fence before we go,” I said.

  Harry shook his head. “Bad idea. What if we’re being chased on our way back?”

  “Good point. All right let’s go.”

  * * *

  We were nervous crossing the field to get to Lakeview Ranch. Our eyes tracked the sky and field, looking for Screechers, even as we strained to listen for telltale buzzing sounds or clunking footsteps.

  Coming to the cul-de-sac where I’d entered the neighborhood the night before, I retrieved my dew-soaked M16 and slung it over the opposite shoulder from Harry’s AR15.

  Harry nodded approvingly, and we started down the street to his house. If I’d known last night that Harry’s house was on the corner of the same street I’d started on, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble—and also saved Duncan his life.

  Down at the end of the street, beyond the now silent Humvee, I saw the burned-out wreck of the car I’d seen get blown apart last night. I shuddered at the memory.

  The street in front of Harry’s house was buckled in a trail of giant claw-shaped indentations from the Screecher tank I’d encountered last night. The span between those footprints was almost the same as the width of the whole street.

  Following Harry up his driveway, I stopped at the bottom of the steps leading to his front porch. Duncan’s remains glared accusingly at me in the light of day. The porch was splattered with bloody chunks lying in a thick black puddle between us and the
gaping hole where Harry’s front door should have been. Harry looked away with a grimace, cursing under his breath.

  My stomach churned, but I couldn’t look away. Duncan had undoubtedly saved my life by sacrificing his. If he hadn’t drawn the attention of that tank, Harry’s front door would have remained standing, and I’d probably have died looking for a way to get in.

  “Let’s go around the back,” Harry suggested.

  I followed him around the side of his house, keeping a firm grip on my M16 and scanning for targets. The air was crisp and quiet. The calm after the storm.

  When we got to the back of Harry’s house, we found the French doors lying in a twisted mess on the grass. We crept through the gaping hole where they’d been, our eyes scanning the darkened, rubble-strewn interior. Broken glass crunched under our boots.

  I turned to Harry. “Let’s not stay longer than we have to. We need containers for the fuel. Where are they?”

  “This way.”

  Harry led me down the hallway that tank shells had chased me through last night. The wall was splintered to the point that I could see straight into Harry’s garage through a collapsing frame of two by fours. He walked through the wall, ducking under a buckled beam and jumping down into the garage. When I landed beside him, he pointed to the walls around the black SUV that was parked there. Those walls were lined with open metal shelves. I saw cans of food, bottles of water, jerry cans of gas, toilet paper, blankets, sleeping bags, flashlights, batteries...

  “We’re lucky. No one’s been here to loot the place yet,” Harry said, and walked straight over to the jerry cans.

  I stayed where I was, staring at his SUV. “Is that car four-wheel drive?”

  “No. That would have cost an extra five thousand, and at the time I thought, why bother? I live in the South, and I’m not going to do any off-roading.” Harry snorted. “Looks like that came back to bite me in the ass.”

  “Still,” I said, shaking my head. “We could use a second vehicle.”

  “We’d need twice the fuel,” Harry pointed out.

  “We’d also have twice the room.”

  “True.” Harry grabbed two five-gallon jerry cans off the shelf, and I could hear the gasoline sloshing around inside of them.

  “Do you have enough?” I asked.

  He glanced at the storage rack beside him. “Maybe, yeah, I think so.”

  “Then let’s do it. That way we won’t have to freeze our asses off in the back of the truck.”

  Harry flashed a lop-sided grin at me. “I thought you said we’d be warm enough with a tarp and sleeping bags.”

  “I lied.”

  Harry chuckled. “All right. Help me load her up, and let’s get out of here.”

  I nodded. Harry fished the car keys out of a drawer in a standing metal tool chest and opened the back of his SUV. He folded the rear seats for extra storage, and then we loaded all of the jerry cans into the back. There were ten of them—exactly the fifty gallons we needed for the truck. The SUV would get far better mileage than Richard’s Super Duty F350, however.

  Harry threw three empty water cooler tanks on top of the jerry cans to satisfy the reason we’d come here—spare containers for diesel. He pointed to the row of remaining water tanks on the floor. “Should we take a few? We’re going to need something to drink.”

  I nodded, but as we strained our backs to lift those sloshing five-gallon tanks off the floor, I was beginning to think that we should empty them instead. My original fuel estimate for the truck didn’t seem even close to good enough, especially not if we were going to have to stop and tow cars and debris out of the road along the way.

  I expressed those concerns to Harry, and he agreed. We began tipping the tanks to pour the water out on the concrete floor of his garage. Water glugged out noisily. That sound was almost enough to drown out the ones we heard next: the crunching of broken glass and the whisper of creaking floorboards. Harry’s eyes widened with alarm and he placed a finger to his lips. We both righted our water jugs and stood up slowly, readying our weapons.

  We listened, staring through the splintered remains of the wall between Harry’s garage and his house. My heart hammered in my chest, and my hands grew slick with sweat on the cold metal casing of my M16.

  Muffled footsteps thumped on carpet, coming closer, and then the whirring of robotic joints joined that sound. Harry raised his shotgun and sighted down the barrel. I did the same with my rifle.

  A Screecher came stalking into view—all gleaming silver. It looked disturbingly human with two legs, two arms, a head... My finger tightened on the trigger of my rifle as that head turned to us. Two black eyes gleamed at us, and the Screecher held up its hands, palms out in a gesture of... surrender?

  I turned to Harry, blinking in shock, just in time to see the barrel of his shotgun flash with a deafening BOOM!

  Chapter 37

  Chuk-chuk. BOOM! Chuk-chuk. BOOM!

  The Screecher staggered backward with each impact. Shells crunched through its armor—one flaying open its chest, the other tearing a ragged furrow through its face, and a third ricocheting off the wall beside its shoulder.

  The Screecher made a strangled sound as it collapsed in the hallway. Chuk-chuk. Harry took an extra second to aim this time. I saw the Screecher thrashing to get up, and I snapped out of it. I tackled Harry to throw off his aim. BOOM! The shell tore through the ceiling.

  “Are you crazy?” he demanded as we fell over and I pinned him to the floor. “Get off me! It’s going to get away!”

  “It wasn’t going to attack us!” I spat. I jerked my head sideways to indicate the struggling machine.

  “So what?” Harry said as he pushed me off.

  The Screecher was back on its feet, staring at us and making more strangled sounds. Harry scrambled to his feet and took aim. I wrestled with him. “Stop it! We surrendered, remember? You want to get us killed?”

  “Fuck off!” he roared, and elbowed me in the gut.

  The alien robot pointed at Harry and fired a shot of its own with a muted p-plip. A pair of rods appeared in his chest, flashing in time to electrical zapping sounds. He jittered and fell over, his limbs twitching and eyes rolling.

  I gaped at the humanoid Screecher as it ducked inside the garage and stalked toward me, both arms raised and aiming at me now. It made another distorted, strangled noise, and I saw that the speaker grille, which was located exactly where a human’s mouth would be, had been ripped open by one of Harry’s slugs.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, holding up my hands, palms out the way I’d seen the robot do. “We don’t mean you any harm.” That probably sounded like an empty assurance after Harry’s shooting spree.

  The Screecher stopped within easy reach of me, fully two feet taller than I was. It made a hissing noise that sounded frustrated to me, and then it made a show of looking around. The robot’s eyes were like two camera lenses. Its arms dropped to its sides and weapon barrels slid into concealed compartments in its forearms. The robot’s hands clenched and unclenched restlessly as it surveyed the garage. I saw five fingers on each hand. Shock rippled through me. My eyes tracked down to the robot’s feet. They were less human. No toes, just four splayed metal prongs for stability.

  Turning back to me, the robot aimed one of its arms at the ground between us and I saw weapon barrels sliding out of concealment once more. A bright green laser hit the floor. The concrete instantly began sizzling and smoking as the laser evaporated the water we’d poured out a few moments ago. I took a step back, watching as the Screecher traced a smoking pattern on the concrete.

  Harry groaned and mumbled something. I glanced at him. He rocked his head from side to side, obviously still dazed.

  The sizzling noise of the laser stopped and the green glow vanished. The robot waved me over, and I suppressed a shiver, chilled by how familiar this alien’s appearance and body language were.

  I saw the pattern on the scorched concrete, but I couldn’t make sense of it in the dim li
ght of the garage. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

  The Screecher’s eyes glowed to life, dazzling me with their light and peeling away the shadows. Suddenly the pattern of scorch marks at my feet became clear. It was a two-dimensional image. To one side I saw one of the four-legged Screechers with its ball-shaped head, and its six spider-like arms raised in a threatening posture. Beside that were three people. One of them was taller than the rest, with thinner legs and arms, and it was standing between the four-legged robot and the other two people. It was hard to tell from such a limited image, but I got the distinct impression that two of those people were me and Harry, and that the taller one was this Screecher. I pointed to it and then pointed to the robot. “Is that you?”

  To my amazement, the machine nodded.

  “You understood me?” I asked.

  The Screecher made another strangled sound, and then cocked its head to one side.

  Maybe it understood my gesture and not my words. I pointed to the other two human figures and then to myself and Harry. He was still lying on the floor, trying to get up, but every time he did, the stakes in his chest electrocuted him again.

  “And that’s us?” I asked, turning back to the robot.

  Another nod.

  I shook my head. “What does it mean?”

  The robot took a hesitant step forward, then held up a hand, palm out, as if to reassure me. Another step. I peered up at the robot, squinting into the light pouring from its eyes. I couldn’t help leaning away. This thing could probably rip out my throat faster than I could blink.

  Just then, its arms swept up, and its body arched over me. I cried out in alarm, and tried to get away, but it wrapped one arm around me and curved its body over mine, trapping me where I stood. I glimpsed the robot’s other arm sweeping around the garage with weapons deployed and bright green lasers tracking.

  I got the message loud and clear: this Screecher was on our side.

  Chapter 38