Occupation: A Post-Apocalyptic Alien Invasion Thriller (Rise Book 1)

by Nathan Hystad

  They made their way forward for miles before Monet lifted a hand, telling him to stop. He didn’t know why at first, then he felt it before hearing the sound. The ground rumbled slightly, the leaves on the trees shook as something drew near.

  “What is it? Seekers?” he asked, a whisper in her ear.

  “No. This is different.” She stared into the cloudy sky above, and he joined her. The sound grew louder, like two rocks rubbing against each other. The ground vibrated aggressively and Monet ran to the edge of the tree line.

  When Alec arrived, he saw it. The object was huge, boxy, and unnerving in both sight and sound. It almost sounded like the ship was screaming, and he fought the urge to clap his palms over his ears. He needed to see and hear this. This was what they were fighting against.

  Monet’s dark skin paled slightly, her brown eyes wide as she watched it roar through the sky, lowering only a short distance away.

  “Looks like our destination has reinforcements,” she said.

  “What do we do? Where do we go?” Alec was filled with panic. He expected Monet to grab his arm and drag him away.

  “Nothing changes,” she said. “We keep going as planned.”

  Chapter 23

  Sw-18

  The storm had driven away the sunlight and left the spent machine where it had run out of power. The last thing SW-18 did before losing all control was to deploy the solar charging array.

  One of the major issues with fully discharging the battery on the older chassis that SW-18 currently inhabited was that when the battery was fully depleted, it had to reach over forty percent before it would reactivate the functions. It was after midday before '18 came online again.

  By that point, with the torrential downpour of the previous day, every trace of the Vermin had been washed away. The Tracker was completely unaided, and in that open environment had less than a thirteen percent chance of finding the trail again on its own.

  If an artificial intelligence of limited capability could sigh in frustration, SW-18 would have done so at that point.

  The next logical recourse was to call in reinforcements, but it risked being decommissioned and recycled if his information didn’t prove a valuable use of resources.

  Standing up fully but keeping the solar charging array open, it moved slowly-the only way it could move without collapsing the array-to the middle of the street and turned a wide circle to take in where it was. A corroded road sign registered against the databanks and gave a more precise location, making SW-18 long for the good old days, before the satellites failed, when they had access to global mapping imagery and instant communications.

  Now, so many years after hunting down the masses of Vermin in the interior, priorities were shifted almost exclusively to the manufacturing plants on the east coast. It did the only thing it could to get some help in locating its quarry, but not enough to call in a full support group where the actions of a single Tracker drone would be scrutinized too closely.

  It closed up the array, deciding that forty-three percent was better than nothing and trying to calculate the success odds if the time after the call for reinforcements was spent searching or recharging, and reared up on the chassis’ rear legs against an old junction box under a telegraph pole. Extending a wire into the box, it went through the laborious process of effectively dialing up each line it could connect to until it reached a system link on the other end.

  Transferring data that way was slow; as slow as the human’s chaotic internet database it had once sampled so long ago had called "dial-up." Submitting the request for reinforcements this way helped it stay out of the attention of the Overseers, as did the specific supports it requested.

  CONFIRM INSTRUCTIONS.

  3x SEEKER DRONES DEPLOYED TO 333825N, 107046W.

  AWAIT ARRIVAL.

  SW-18 scanned the road, seeing nothing of interest, and decided to get a full charge in the sunlight while awaiting its backup before resuming the hunt.

  Chapter 24

  Cole

  The meal was the best thing either of them had tasted in a long time. Cole had found another bowl, which he used to scoop out a generous portion of the stew that smelt rich and full of flavor. Lina tried to pour some into the pan he ate from, his metal spoon scraping on the cooking pot with each pass. He refused.

  “I’ve been holed up dry and resting for a couple of days,” he said. “You haven’t eaten properly in a week.” She seemed to accept his reasoning, eating two-thirds of the fruity, meaty broth and slurping down the fluid as Cole was finishing his smaller portion. He carefully licked clean his spoon and slid it very deliberately into the top pouch on the front of his battered pack where it evidently belonged.

  He sat back and burped loudly before remembering he had company-even though she was directly in front of him the whole time-and looked both shocked and embarrassed.

  “It’s okay.” She chuckled, clearly fighting the urge to laugh louder at the boyish look of shame on his face, “I’m guessing you haven’t been around people much recently?”

  “Not for three summers,” he said, suddenly more subdued.

  “What happened three summers ago?” she asked.

  “Tom left,” he said bluntly, softening his gruff words with a small shrug.

  “I’m sorry,” she answered. “Was he… was he your father?” Cole pulled a face that said he was thinking hard about a question he’d pondered plenty of times before.

  “I don’t think so,” he told her. “I thought he might’ve been for a couple of years, even asked him about it once, but he just laughed when I did. No, he was my… he was the man who... He’d come and go throughout my life. I was attached to him.”

  “You’ve just been wandering around for three years on your own?” she asked.

  “Not exactly,” he told her, hesitating with his hand resting on his bag before taking it away. “What about you?” he asked.

  “I told you everything there is to know yesterday,” she replied, refraining from discussing that dark hole where the screams of her people lived.

  “Would you know where you lived before if I showed you a map?” he asked, surprising her.

  “I…” She hesitated, unsure of the truth of the answer she was going to give automatically. “I’m not sure. It depends if you could show me where we are now.”

  Cole nodded, pulling a carefully folded map from his pack to lay it out with care as if the tough, thick paper was a precious artifact. He stooped low over it, getting his face less than a hand’s breadth from the paper as he muttered and traced his finger around the southwestern quadrant of what the map called the United States.

  “This is where I got into contact with the drones,” he said, his grubby fingertip obscuring a tiny town beside a snaking streak of light blue. The finger ran north, following the water course as he spoke. “I went this way, going in and out of the water to try and break the track so they couldn’t chase me. Ended up… here,” he said, his digit resting on a spot near nothing much at all. He stepped away, inviting her to look.

  His finger rested on the raised spot they now occupied, her own finger tracing a return route south until she found the big bend in the river. She followed it until she found the big town she thought she’d skirted around, heading away from the river to the west until the map showed square inches of nothing at all. There, in a valley containing nothing, she tapped her finger on the paper.

  “That was where my people lived,” she said, appearing pleased with herself for interpreting the landscape on the map until her smile faded away with the memory of her people she would not see again. Her chin quivered and she sniffed twice in rapid succession.

  Cole shuffled his feet, not sure what to say, so he walked away from the map and messed with the sticks in the fire, pushing them into the flames.

  “So what now?” she asked. “Are you going to aimlessly mill around until you’re old?”

  “No,” Cole said, still poking at the fire with one of the smaller sticks. He
seemed to hesitate about saying more, and she didn’t know why, so she pressed him.

  “Are you going somewhere?” she guessed. “Did Tom tell you to go somewhere?”

  “No,” he said again, sounding resigned and a little sulky about it. He stood abruptly and returned to the map to thump his finger on a spot in a place called Mexico after a few seconds of looking.

  “There was supposed to be a safe place there,” he said, moving his finger to the west to another dot of nowhere, “and another here. I couldn’t get to this one—too many drones—and the one out west is gone. Burned down a long time ago by the look of it.”

  Lina said nothing in case she broke the spell of him speaking more than a few words without being forced.

  “There’s supposed to be more, South Carolina and Florida, but getting there at this time of the year would be too dangerous.”

  “Why dangerous?” she asked.

  “There are massive storms that come inland over the next few months. We’ve been caught in them before; whole trees flying through the air like God was angry. We can’t go that way.”

  “Out of the valley,” she muttered to herself, recounting the directions. “Out of the valley and north, until you reach the snow-capped mountains.”

  “What did you say?” he asked, eyeing her carefully. She ignored him, tracing her finger back up the map to their location and continuing north until she found the marks on the map indicating the ground rising up.

  “Snow-capped mountains,” she said, tapping the higher point on the map a clear two folds north of their little hilltop.

  “What do you know about it?” Cole asked, suspicion creeping into his words. She turned to him, looking him intensely in the eyes and making him feel like he wanted to look away.

  “The mountains,” she said insistently. “That’s where we have to go.” She stared at him with the flames of the renewed fire dancing in the reflection of their eyeballs. Just as suddenly as the fervor had overtaken her, it faded, and she dropped her own gaze to turn away. She didn’t know why she was so adamant, so fixated on getting there, other than to pass on what had happened to her people.

  “Tom called it Cripple Creek,” Cole said softly after a while.

  “What?” she asked, eyes shooting back up to his.

  “He said it was the last place to go if all of the other places were gone.”

  “Cripple Creek,” Lina said, as though repeating their destination would solidify it as their joint mission.

  It was amazing what an achievable purpose gave them. Their kit was emptied out and repacked into their bags after it was thoroughly prepared. Cole showed her how to strip and clean the single-barrel shotgun she’d found, passing on the lessons he’d learned years before when the old man he followed had become too old to lead from the front.

  She admitted that she wanted to fire it, if only to see what it felt like. Even though she’d been around the few guns in their village growing up, she’d never fired one, or even been close when the trigger had been pulled. She knew that much unnecessary noise was a stupid thing to wish for, especially in the still air after the rainstorm on the hilltop over an empty valley. The sound of a gunshot would carry as far as she could see.

  Cole set as many snare traps as he had twine and wire for, catching more turkeys than they could eat, keeping a fire going day and night to smoke the strips of meat into jerky to take with them.

  Water was more of an issue, as to carry all they could need would mean weighing themselves down and defeat the purpose of traveling light. They carried six bottles each, which should be enough for almost five days before they started to feel the effects of dehydration. That gave them five days to resupply, which shouldn’t be a problem.

  The real issue was the five hundred miles they had to travel on foot, finding and gathering supplies as they went. For the most part, it was a straight run north, but they’d find themselves driven east or west by the mountains anyway. What bothered Cole, and what kept him looking at the map for over an hour until his head hurt from the concentration, was the big city smack in the middle of the obvious route.

  He tried to spell it out, unsure how the word should sound, giving up after his fourth attempt to master the unusual selection of letters, but came to the conclusion that he wanted to avoid it and told Lina as much.

  “Won't that add at least two days to the journey?” she asked, clearly unhappy at the prospect of adding another day to the month they’d probably be walking for. Cole thought it might add three but just nodded.

  “Big places should be avoided,” he told her. “Places where lots of people used to live. They have underground tunnels and things. Tall buildings. Every time I’ve been near one, there have been Seekers left behind dormant until something comes along.”

  “Dormant?” she asked, unfamiliar with the word.

  “You know, like hibernating?”

  “Oh,” she replied, finally seeming to understand the concept now. The thought of tall buildings and underground tunnels with those buzzing machines sleeping until something woke them up didn’t give her a warm feeling inside, quite the opposite. The prospect of another two days walking wasn’t that bad in comparison.

  “When do we go?”

  “Tomorrow night,” he said, the words rising only fractionally in their inflection, so she took it as a statement and not a question. “Tomorrow night,” he said again, more confidently this time. He went to leave the building into the warm afternoon sun, pausing in the doorway to look at the dark and glowering horizon where a thick band of dark gray promised to bring more rain and wind as violent as the last storm.

  Walking to the open door of the storeroom, a bottle of fresh water tucked into the leg pocket of his pants and a bowl of bones, gristle, and meat in his hand, new noises from inside made him stop. Instead of the usual low growl of the occupant warning him not to come too close, there was the uneven clacking of claws on stone.

  When he’d caught glimpses of the coyote before, it had always been on the small pile of coats he’d thrown in there to keep the injured animal warm and comfortable. He stopped, suddenly more wary of the animal in case it recovered enough and didn’t know how sorry he was that he’d hurt it.

  Stepping away from the building carefully to see the inside of the dark room, he crouched ready to slide the bowl into the shadows, when a pair of eyes reflected the dull sunlight, fixed on him and unwavering. He kept his own gaze locked with them as he carefully tipped the contents into the dirt and dust beside the door and rested the bowl down to fill it with the water from the bottle.

  Finished, he stood and backed off as the eyes came forwards. The coyote limped on its hind legs but came on steady enough. It sniffed at the food, deciding to leave the dusty bones and strips of meat for later, and went for the water instead. It took two noisy laps of it, pausing to curl a lip and expose a set of canines large enough to cause him concern.

  Chapter 25

  Sw-18

  The low buzz of the automated transport hovercraft was detected by SW-18 from about four miles out. Perhaps it was something to do with the design of the chassis that the senses mimicked the four-legged canines they were loosely based on, but SW-18 was impressed, or at least appreciated its increased sensory abilities.

  The ship didn’t stop, just looped a wide arc and opened a bomb-bay door to drop the three Seeker drones into open air before heading west. Three small shapes arrested their descent as their flight mode engaged, then waited until they picked up the beacon the Tracker flashed twice to transmit the authorization codes. As one, they turned and flew in SW-18’s direction in an arrowhead formation.

  The three drones hovered ten feet away from the ground where SW-18 sat and synced with its command codes to allow full override control. The drones were capable only of following instructions or default programming. They weren’t tactically minded like SW-18 was; they couldn’t think to stay put for a day and charge up as much energy as possible to be able to pursue the Vermin for tw
enty-four hours without stopping.

  No matter how big the lead the quarry had on it, SW-18 was intent on running them to ground and fulfilling the mission. It gave the order to cast ahead, watching the drones obey the order as they followed the set, programmed search pattern.

  SW-18 was going off book, in that it wasn’t adhering to the standard protocol of the hunt and kill procedures. It had called for the three drones specifically; three wouldn’t be enough to arouse any suspicion or have the order checked by a human Hunter or an Overseer. That meant it was free to use them in unorthodox ways without risk of outside intervention.

  Three was a small number, small enough to avoid detection or attention, but it would act as a driving force to flush out the Vermin it calculated was still hiding in the area. After all the years it had spent hunting humans, it understood enough about their abilities and tactics to know that of all the Vermin it had brought down in its deployments, none had moved through such a violent storm.

  The quarry had to be close, and using the drones like a pack of dogs as the humans once had hunting for food or sport held a certain irony. SW-18 would have its prize. Soon.

  Chapter 26

  Dex

  Dex could tell he was close. Hunting someone who lacked an ID was not an easy task. There was so much space to roam around in. At least in cases like Trent James’, the Hunter knew a location they’d occupied. Here, he didn’t have much to go on.

  He backtracked after a night of driving around, followed by a few uneasy hours of sleep in the backseat of his car. He wished he had a cup of coffee.