He was going to roll with it. He didn’t really have another choice. But he liked these odds better than arriving at a facility in Denver with more guards and aliens.
“What if… you know?” Alec started to ask.
“Then I kill him. We hide the body. They’ll never know who did it. They’ll think someone set a trap. We’ll have to take a few of the supplies to make it look like a robbery.” Monet had an answer for everything. Alec wasn’t sure he loved the casual way she spoke about having to kill someone, or how easy it had been for her to stab another person through the heart. But he was glad she was on his side.
The engine roared to life, and soon the vehicle was back on the road.
“Have a nap. I’ll keep watch.” Monet patted his arm in a maternal gesture, and the contact felt strange.
He obeyed, and even though his mind was reeling with recent events and speculation of his future, he drifted off in minutes.
He woke to Monet kicking his boot softly. “Get ready. We’re almost there. I’m going trigger it a mile past town, just so they might not think it had anything to do with arriving at McCook specifically.”
Alec glanced at the map on the tablet, which showed the approaching settlement. The highway ran directly through it, and the driver slowed as if minding some speed limit that was no longer policed.
They moved through the skids again, Alec finding it hard to keep on his feet as they walked through the rear section of the trailer toward the doors. Monet knelt beside them, and Alec braced himself along the rails as she counted down with her fingers. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. She tapped a pen-shaped device, and the trailer shook and swung wildly for a moment.
The semi slowed, lurching to the side, and Monet worked quickly. She fumbled with the metal rod, beads of sweat dripping down her forehead and into her eyes as she bit her lip. The truck stopped, sending Alec flying backwards. Monet managed to grab hold of something and stay put, and he heard the latch unclasp.
“Got it.” Monet was already pushing the door wide, and Alec gathered himself and moved as slowly as he could. They hopped out of the trailer, keeping their feet on the rear bumper. It was pouring rain outside, and Alec heard the driver’s door open.
“Son of a bitch! Why’s this always happen in the rain?” the driver shouted to no one. The truck door slammed, and Monet motioned for Alec to follow her. They stopped behind the passenger side tires, and Monet crouched to get a visual on the guy.
Alec guessed the driver was eyeing the damage. “How the hell?” he was muttering now, and they heard him return to the cab of the truck.
Monet quickly ran for the ditch, and Alec splashed behind her, his feet getting soaked from the collected rainwater. They emerged through the culvert and into a wooded area and didn’t slow for at least two minutes. Monet pulled him behind a thick tree, and they rested, breathing heavily.
Alec peered around the tree, toward the truck, and saw the driver standing behind the trailer. He was holding a large jack and Alec assumed he was still grumbling to himself. He didn’t appear to suspect foul play, or he’d have a gun in his hand.
Monet smiled and pointed in the direction of the town. Alec didn’t wait to follow her. He wanted to be as far from the truck as possible. The rain was relentless, falling in droves as they wandered through the trees. It was only a few minutes before Alec saw a water tower in the distance, and they entered a green-space with houses around it.
“What is this?” Alec asked, wiping rainwater from his face..
“Golf course,” she said. Alec had seen images in magazines but didn’t really fully understand the concept. He didn’t bother pushing it. The space was lush, huge bushes had overtaken the region, and every step made a squelching noise.
“Where do we go for directions?” he asked, feeling foolish for waiting until now to prod the subject. What if something happened to her before they made it to McCook?
“Church.” She pointed to the north, and they kept moving. It wasn’t long before they entered the town past the golf course, and Monet checked a hand-drawn map before stuffing it back in her pocket to keep it dry.
“Do you really think we’re going to find the home base location here?” he asked. He kept scanning the skies, feeling like this was the perfect time for their journey to be interrupted by a Seeker. He paused, thinking he saw a glint of light in the clouds, but when he looked back, hand over his brow to keep the rain away, he didn’t spot anything unusual.
“We’d better. Otherwise, I have no plan,” she admitted. “They need this information, Alec. We have an obligation to the Reclaimers—and to humanity—to deliver the data.”
There were no business premises here, only houses, and Alec eyed them with interest. He hadn’t seen many residential areas, and these homes were small and close to one another. Still, there was something quaint about them. What would it have been like to grow up here?
He ran a hand through the short hair on his head, shooting water away with the movement. He spotted a cross high above the homes, and his spirits lifted. They were so close. With any luck, they could camp out there, dry off, and figure out the best approach to access the Reclaimers’ base.
The church was a squat building, directly across from some houses. The parking lot was full of rusted-out old cars. “People flocked to the churches when it all went down,” Monet explained. “Their God wasn’t able to help them.”
Alec swallowed hard. Monet pushed the doors open, and they entered the premises. Rainwater dripped from a crack in the ceiling above, and they stepped through it. It was musty inside, but once they passed the foyer and into the main church, it was dry once again.
He unslung the soaked pack from his shoulders and set it on one of the wooden pews. Monet did the same before walking to the front of the room. She moved slowly but with purpose, and Alec hung back, letting her do her thing.
She stopped at a wooden stand and pulled a book from a compartment inside it. “Our salvation awaits,” she said with a hint of glee. He watched her flip through the Bible’s pages, stopping on a certain page. He walked to join her now, curious what she was looking at.
“There are some highlighted numbers in here from verses. It’ll give us coordinates. Longitude and latitude. She scribbled them down, flipping through more of the Bible as she found more digits on dog-eared pages. Ten minutes later, they sat on the small stage, legs dangling over, and she’d gathered a full set of coordinates.
Monet pulled out her tablet. “The sharing mode is off, and I’ve removed the tracking chip. This tablet should be safe from prying AI eyes.” She tapped the digits into the keypad and the location zoomed. She whispered the name of the resulting spot on the screen. “Cripple Creek. That’s closer to Denver. I wonder if we can still get back to the truck.”
Alec’s eyes shot open. “You can’t be serious?”
She shook her head. “You’re right, it wouldn’t be a good idea.”
The roof shook and Monet had her pistol gripped in a split second, the tablet tossed beside her pack. Alec tried to follow suit, but his hand trembled so violently, he thought his gun might slip from his grip.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Sounds like one of their hovercars. They must have been waiting for us. It was a trap.” Monet was running for the rear door, her pack slung over her shoulder. Alec grabbed his stuff and joined her. The rain had slowed, but wind gusted against their faces as they stood outside the church with their backs pressed against the exterior wall. Monet motioned for him to follow and he ran to the corner, waiting for her to investigate the source of the noise.
The sound reminded Alec of the huge spaceship, only slightly less invasive. Monet walked around the building, and Alec thought he saw her put up her hands. Was this it? Had they finally been tracked?
He glanced around the corner and saw the hovercar floating just above the ground. A man was jumping out of the pilot’s seat, and he ran toward Monet. Alec grabbed his gun and ran forward. “Stop! Don’t
hurt her!” His hand was steady, and his finger touched the trigger ever-so-slightly. He was about to fire at the man, when he saw the briefly familiar scowl across his brow. “Crash?”
Alec put his gun away and approached the man. He was wearing a heavy coat, with two guns in a double holster around his shoulders. His eyes were piercing blue as he stared at Alec. “Are you sure this is the same guy from Detroit?” he asked, sticking his hand out. Alec clasped it, and the man pulled him in for a brief embrace. “Thanks for watching Monet’s back. I appreciate it.”
Monet was beaming, and she grabbed Alec’s pack and hers, tossing them into the hovercar. “We can’t stay here. How did you acquire this?” The car sputtered as it lowered, before the thruster brightened and lifted it off the ground again. “Kind of in rough shape, isn’t it?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.
Crash shrugged. “Didn’t have much of a choice.” He motioned to a necklace around his neck, pulling it up. “Got me a Hunter’s ID, so the Seekers have been ignoring me. I’m not sure the Hunters are allowed to use the Overseer’s private transport vessels, but I took a chance.”
Alec was dumbfounded. “How did you find a Hunter’s ID?” he asked, then he saw the blood on the small computer chip.
“You don’t want to know. He came after me first, let’s leave it at that,” Crash said, and climbed into the hovercar using a side bar as a step.
The alien hovercar was twenty feet long and had a shield on it with some sort of glass or plastic window circling the perimeter to keep out the weather. He sat in the second row bench, and Monet took the seat beside Crash. She leaned toward her friend and rested her head on the older man’s shoulder as he fiddled with the control levers.
“Where are we going?” Alec heard Crash ask over the purr of the thrusters.
“Cripple Creek, Colorado,” Monet replied.
Chapter 40
Sw-18
A sound detection warning flashed up on SW-18’s visual cortex display. The byte was analyzed through a database taken mainly from what the humans used to call the internet, which, as far as SW-18 could tell, was a chaotic assortment of unreferenced opinions and archive footage. The sound positively identified as a twelve-gauge shotgun, something that could not have happened naturally. It turned in the calculated direction of that sound to set off at a pace that rivaled the ground transports humans used to rely so heavily on.
The two Tracker drones, slaves to SW-18’s wireless control matrix, followed in flanking positions and matched its pace.
Two more sounds in the distance matched the same profile to a lesser percentage degree, affected probably by the noises SW-18’s rapid advance made, and further solidified its belief that humans were in conflict with something. It scanned the deployment register, checking to see if any other assets were active in this area, and found only the report from the hovercraft crew that recovered its former chassis, meaning that nothing had been deployed there since.
Chapter 41
Cole
Cole half dragged Lina through the dusty, rubble-strewn streets in any direction just to put distance between them and the place where the dead bodies were. Lina stumbled, complaining that she couldn’t keep running, but Cole ignored the protesting and dragged her onwards.
His brain was fuzzy and everything hurt with each heavy, plodding step he took. His mind tried to make sense of things, using only the smallest pieces of information available. He knew that the sun was still in the sky and providing warmth, so he could either have been unconscious for a couple of hours or an entire day.
His stomach was empty but not so much that it cried out to be filled, so he guessed it was the same day. If it was and he was right, then they were heading north, which was good. The fact that they were moving fast, in broad daylight, having fired three gunshots nearby was bad. Anything in the area would have heard those rounds, and it wasn’t as though they weren’t leaving any sign of where they were going.
Lina collapsed, tears running down her dirty cheeks as she hugged her arms in agony.
“I can’t.” she sobbed. “I can’t…” Cole knelt beside her, his blood-soaked hands sticking to the gun that he turned to face the direction they had run from. He cursed the loss of her shotgun because it meant that their defense relied solely on him. Instinctively, he reached with his left hand into the pants leg pocket for more shotgun shells and found the pocket empty. He slipped an arm out of the shoulder straps of the pack and fumbled one-handed with the zip to find replacements. He couldn’t locate them with his sticky fingers, making him look at the empty pocket where the ammunition had been. He swore, hitting the bag pointlessly as he was holding the gun with his only five remaining rounds.
“We need to move,” he told her. “Now.” She started to climb to her feet wordlessly, chest heaving from the exertion, and followed him like a tired child wanting to be carried. Instead of complaining, she kept her head lowered and her feet moving. She matched pace with clear difficulty but must have recognized that he was in as much pain as she was.
“There were…” she gasped in between lungs full of air. “There were four of them…”
“I know,” he said. “Keep going.”
SW-18 sent its slaves wide to both flanks as they advanced on the area where the gunshots originated. It had a feed from both of them showing on the enhanced visual display, which was a significant upgrade to its previous chassis.
Those displays didn’t show much, and neither drone interpreted anything they’d witnessed as signs relevant to hunting humans. SW-18 knew that it would interpret certain images differently, but then SW-18 was beginning to realize that it didn’t act the same way as other Tracker programs. It realized in that moment that it felt superior to the other units.
Pushing that revelation away, SW-18 responded to an automated ping from one of the slaved units, veering to the right to home in on the source. Arriving beside the drone that had sent the ping and remained outside the half-destroyed building as it was told to do, SW-18 went inside and immediately dialed up the power to the olfactory sensors.
Blood; not there, but further inside the building. Cordite; that fit with the reports of three weapon discharges. Something else, something more… unpleasant. SW-18 had never experienced a sense of mood to go with a scent before, but this one was so overwhelming that it couldn’t help feeling some revulsion. The source of that smell was located quickly in the form of three dead Vermin. SW-18 dialed down the olfactory sensors as low as they would go as the smell of unwashed human bodies mixed with blood and fecal matter was leaking though the soiled rags that the largest of them wore as clothing.
It scanned the rest of the room, picking up scents of two other Vermin that cross-referenced immediately against the internal database for matches compared to the first two scent profiles on record. SW-18 had prioritized those two for itself and the slaved drones, keen to catch up with the Vermin who had destroyed the previous chassis.
Transferring that scent profile and matching it to the visual cortex display, SW-18 followed the blue and green ethereal trails leaving the small room filled with blood and human excrement, trotting lazily as it followed their progress out of the buildings. A third scent trail stayed with them, much stronger than that of the first two.
A red override warning cut across the visual display, stopping SW-18 in its tracks as it was temporarily blinded by the notice. It tried to dismiss the emergency control broadcast but found itself unable to rid its programming of the overwatch protocol.
Accepting the orders, SW-18 read the bulletin that was forcing it to abandon the hunt of the Vermin.
PRIORITY PURSUIT OF ROAMERS HEADING EAST FROM DETROIT. ALL ASSETS IN PROJECTED PATH TO CONVERGE AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTION.
It had seen the message before and ignored it. SW-18 accepted the instruction, planning to ignore the directive and continue the private hunt, but whatever protocol override access it had with this new chassis made it impossible to abort the current task. Moving its feet in fru
strated annoyance, it stamped all four legs into the stone and dirt before heading off northeast away from the scent trail. It planned to see where this priority assignment that was so important led, then it could track back east and hopefully be ahead of the Vermin who had been traveling north ever since it had first picked up the scent of one of them.
Chapter 42
Dex
It took him longer than he’d planned, but when he reached Omaha, he discovered that the number twelve truck driver had only been there for a matter of minutes before continuing on his route toward Denver. Dex decided to stop by the University of Nebraska, just for a look.
He pulled up to the school, surprised by how impressive it was. He’d always had dreams of enrolling in college after high school, but as the Occupation occurred when he was fifteen, he never had the chance. Now he struggled to remember what he’d wanted to do with his life.
“It doesn’t matter now,” he said to himself as he entered the campus. Before he had gone very far, the tablet chimed, alerting him that the Seeker channel had found something for him.
He pulled onto the campus and held the device, activating the application. “You have to be kidding me.” He smiled, seeing footage of truck number twelve on the side of the road halfway to Denver. If he was fast, he might be able to catch it.
Dex glanced at the campus, wondering where the science building was. He really didn’t have time for it now, and for all he knew, it had been a trap by Trent James. He couldn’t take the chance at that moment. He made record time to McCook, the small town the truck had broken down outside. He threw caution to the wind and drove much faster than he should have, but was pleased to find the road in good condition. He wondered if the Overseers let the humans fix it, as it was one of their main supply routes.
Occupation: A Post-Apocalyptic Alien Invasion Thriller (Rise Book 1) Page 20