by Jesse Wilson
These people caught in the blood rain were now soldiers of a nearly unbeatable army. Go, my children. Spread the message of unity throughout the land, Narbosaurus communicated to the newly infected with his mind link. At once, the newly infected people turned their yellow eyes towards the fleeing crowds that escaped and gave chase.
He watched and was pleased with this when with no warning, a bright blue beam hit his open wound and sealed it shut. Narbosaurus looked up and saw Xule flying right at him. So, I see you’re not dead and you got an upgrade from the humans, he transmitted directly into Xule’s head. This made him stop in his tracks.
“I’m not dead yet. I’ve come here to challenge you for domination of the planet. One on one. If I win, this planet is claimed as Nuridian Territory; if you win, you win,” Xule said to the massive beast out loud, refusing to engage it telepathic contact with him.
What makes you think I will accept this challenge, lizard? Narbosaurus replied. Xule winced; the monster sounded more like thunder in his head than an actual voice and it was difficult to understand.
“Because you’re an arrogant snozbucket who thinks he can’t lose,” Xule said and the beast smiled.
It’s like we’re best friends; you know me so well. Let’s fight there on this road they call the Strip. I’ll let you use your new toy, and just in the interest of being fair, I won’t have any of them help me. I’ll meet you on their scale, Narbosaurus responded to him in his mind. Xule watched as the massive beast instantly melted down into a river of slime and flew into the darkness below.
“I never doubted you for a second,” Sippy said to him.
“Yes, you did. Stop lying because you’re really bad at it,” Xule replied as the two of them followed their target down to the burning Vegas strip.
The imposter form of Bruce stood there on the strip, alone, lit only with the fire he created seconds ago. The monster had taken a form he’d grown comfortable with and waited for his challenger.
“No, this won’t do at all,” he said disapprovingly. He spread out his hands and unleashed two thin green beams in opposite directions as he spun around in a circle. Everything those rays touched burst into flames and created a ring of fire.
“Great. Now everyone can see it when I make him a greasy spot on the pavement,” Bruce said with a smile, but he really wasn’t expecting anyone to stick around and watch this happen. Xule landed behind him seconds later.
“So, I assume you want to hit me first?” Bruce asked him, but never turned to look.
“It’s like you know me,” he replied and fired his ice beam at Bruce. In turn, the monster stepped out of the way, and faster than Xule could see, he was standing beside him, uncomfortably close.
“It’s about now you should realize who the new ruler of this world is,” the thing said to him, and Xule narrowed his eyes.
“I knew you couldn’t fight fairly with me. Super speed? Really? It is almost like you don’t even want a challenge,” Xule said and smiled.
“Well, you know how it is, I—” Xule smashed the ice beam projector into the monster’s stomach so hard that it knocked him down, and then he fired.
Bruce just barely rolled out of the way as the ground he escaped from was frozen solid. Not wasting a second of time, Xule kept the trigger pressed and followed the monster. The beam slid over Bruce’s left leg, freezing it solid.
“Damn you,” it hissed as it broke free, snapping its leg off where it was frozen.
Bruce sprung up and charged his attacker as fast as he could. Xule couldn’t react fast enough. To Narbosaurus, everything was moving in slow motion as he went in for the kill. Seconds before ripping a hole through Xule’s chest, another ice beam came from the left and knocked him to the ground.
“No, not possi—” He was cut off as another beam came from the night sky straight on him from above, freezing him solid and encasing him in ice. Xule was frozen with a different kind of terror, eyes wide and breathing heavy as he slowly let the trigger go.
“Are you alright, son?” Bruce asked and walked up to him.
“Yeah, I’m fine, but you sure cut it close,” Xule replied, still trying to calm down. “No other choice; otherwise, it would have seen us coming,” Bruce replied to him as two distinct sounds were approaching them.
One was the sound of a helicopter; the other was the sounds of footsteps.
“Uh, something you should know. Narbosaurus Prime might be beaten, but each one of its minions here shares a piece of the same consciousness. Once the prime is taken out, the mind can be transferred to one of them along with some of the power it has, but this can only be transferred twice,” Xule said to him as he looked around, but all he could see around them was fire.
“You tell me this now?” Bruce’s eyes widened, and he began to look in any direction he could to see where the first attack would come from.
“Well, it was just a theory, but let’s just say when we took it down the first time, we didn’t stick around on the planet to find out if it was true or not. What can I say? It sort of slipped my mind with everything that was going on,” Xule replied as a blue ice beam from a nearby roof fired, freezing something they couldn’t see behind the fire.
“Men, listen, we have a hostile situation in coming. We need to accelerate our extraction to right now,” Bruce said into his radio.
“ETA two minutes. Hold out until then,” the chopper pilot replied to him.
“Two minutes is a damned lifetime,” Bruce said, and Xule didn’t exactly know how long a minute was, but lifetime didn’t sound too reassuring to him.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Logan, they declared martial law. We need to get off the road,” James said to his partner.
“You’ll need to take a left up here, then it’s straight down the road. Last house on the left,” Tina said to them as Logan turned the radio off.
“Thanks,” James replied, fully aware they needed to ditch this car.
Logan looked to his left as they passed the last intersection before they turned. Down that road, he saw a glimpse of what appeared to be an infected human walking in their direction.
“I think I just saw one of those things down the last street we just passed,” Logan said as the panic in him began to rise again. There were people walking down both of the sidewalks, aimless and seeming to be in a daze themselves with shock at all that has happened. James brought the car to a stop.
“Why are you stopping; this is the time when we go faster,” Logan said as his panic began to get the better of him.
“If one is coming towards all these people, we have a chance to stop it,” he replied to him and grabbed his weapon.
“Well, that’d be good, but we tried that, remember? It doesn’t work, and nothing we do can stop them. We need to run,” he pleaded with him, but that steel look in James’ eyes told him that right now he wasn’t listening to anything, let alone reason.
“Damn it, we’re going to do this. Tina, get in the driver seat; we may need to get out of here in a hurry,” Logan said to her as the both of them opened the door.
“The shotgun is loaded. Shoot anyone who comes close to this car who isn’t us,” James said to her and got out. He walked to the side and opened the door for Tina. She got out and moved to the driver side nervously.
“If it goes bad, you’ll run. Promise?” she asked Phoenix.
“It’s going to go bad. No need to worry about that; just be on the lookout for anyone who wants this car. The shotgun is on the dash,” James replied to her and started to walk in the direction Logan had indicated. Tina looked at the long gun and worried that tonight she’d have to use it. Yesterday, life was so normal; no, it was all messed up in ways she couldn’t even begin to understand. She couldn’t she get the demise of the radio announcer out of her head either. What was happening to the world? she wondered as she watched the two of them venture into the unknown, knowing full well this could be the last time that she saw either of them again.
Jam
es and Phoenix walked around the people who didn’t even register them. They were shell-shocked; most of them had witnessed the tower collapse and had been stunned. Logan signaled that around this corner is where he saw it. James nodded, drew his weapon, and swallowed. The two of them pointed their weapons and broke from cover.
Sure enough, just as Phoenix said, one of the infected was slowly making its way down an empty street, walking right down the middle of it. James was hoping he was only seeing things and nothing would have been here. He was painfully wrong.
“Kill it,” James said as he took aim the both of them opened fire. The infected was hit six times, and like before, it fell to the ground. The black fluid poured from the wounds. The two of them watched it for a second, and that’s all the time it took before it began to move again. The black fluid began to retract itself.
“Out of all the stupid ideas you come up with, this has got to be the worst one. I told you there was nothing we could do, didn’t you remember what happened last time?” Logan said to him with a hint of anger in his voice.
“So it was a bit extreme, but the gunshots woke the people up. Danger is near and they are running from us; we might have saved some lives,” James replied to him and smiled.
“What about us? What are we going to do now?” Logan was increasingly concerned about this situation they were in.
“We’re going to run now.” James was admittedly at a loss of what to do next but Tina began to scream.
“Damn it,” Logan cried out, turned and began running back to the car.
James watched as the thing was on its feet, and he could swear that it was smiling at him before it started to run in his direction. James turned and ran for the car at about the same time. Tina was struggling with someone in a suit a man who was in a pure state of panic.
Tina kicked the man in the crotch and he fell backwards, then she pointed the gun at the attacker and pulled the trigger. The recoil knocked her back into the car, but she didn’t fall over. The man’s face was shredded off and his throat was torn open.
Blood speckled her clothes and skin as she stood there. Eyes wide and ears ringing from the blast, all she could see was the man she killed, someone who she would never know. The act of taking a life was emotionally draining, and she didn’t know how she should feel about it. Suddenly, a hand grabbed the weapon and she jumped, taken by surprise and almost pulling the trigger again. Logan stopped her before she could.
“It’s okay now, but we need to go,” he said to her, but she didn’t hear any of it. The gun blast was still overpowering all other noises.
“Come on, get in the back. Hurry,” Logan said again and pointed. She just nodded and let go of the gun. Tina got in the backseat and sat down, but the image of the mangled man was still trapped in her mind. It would likely be there forever. Logan shut the door.
“It’s right behind me. We have to go, now!” James screamed at Logan and ran past him, getting into the car and slamming the door. Logan didn’t see anyone but decided not to waste any time. He got into the car and James slammed on the gas only for the infected thing to land in front of the car.
“Don’t hit it!” Logan yelled out, and James swerved at the last minute.
“The blood is infected. We don’t need that splattered all over the car,” Logan explained; it made sense to James.
“Deal, let’s just get to the house so we can get our bearings again,” James replied to him. Logan looked back at the infected through the rear window and saw that it was already running after someone else; it completely ignored the dead man.
“God help us all,” Logan whispered to himself, a thought he had kept to himself until now. If anyone heard it, they didn’t respond.
***
Officer Quinn and Madison pulled up to the small town police station. It was abandoned on the outside and quiet besides the soft hum of the street lights that cast their amber glow into the streets as far as they could see. Randall shut the car off, unsure of what to do next.
“What should we do now?” she asked him, and he let go of the wheel, carefully almost.
“No idea, but I do know that those things aren’t far away. If we were smart, we’d fill up on gas and get out of Goldfield,” Quinn replied to her. She’d be here only once before, but it was in the middle of the day, and she was only passing through at least a year ago now. In the middle of the night, it was a ghost town, and like everything else, it had a pall of strange terror over all of it. Of course, her mind was still a mess from seeing her child turned into some kind of a monster. Nothing made sense anymore.
She snapped out of her daze. “We can’t leave. If they come here, Patrick will be with them, and we can try to fix—” Quinn glared at her in a hurry.
“Even if they can be fixed, we’re not going to be the ones to do it. The only cure I can think of right now involves gunfire,” Quinn cut her off and the implications of that statement caused her to cringe.
“If there is a cure, we are better off letting the science people find it.” Quinn tried to be reasonable in the face of something that made no sense at all to him.
“I know you’re worried about losing your kid, and that might happen, but we don’t know anything, and right now, I say we go inside and get everything we can and be long gone before they get here,” Quinn said to her and opened his door.
Madison reluctantly agreed and did the same. The two of them walked to the front door. Quinn opened it for her and she went in first.
“Holy hell, Randall, I’ve been trying to get you on the radio for the past fifteen minutes. Where have you been?” a woman with red hair was in a panic, screaming at him.
“The bio team was infected and is on their way here. I estimate about fifteen minutes before they get here, and it would be good if we aren’t here,” Quinn replied to her in a hurry as Madison just stood there.
“Randall, martial law has been declared. No one can go anywhere,” she replied to him and Quinn glared at the clock; time was wasting.
“Alright, Janine, you can stay here if you want to, but we are leaving. Tell Joe and Matt they can stick around if they want to. I know they are out on patrol, but I saw what I saw, and that’s not going to happen to us,” Quinn replied to her and the red-haired woman got on the radio. She’d never heard such fear in his voice before.
“Calling all cars. We have an emergency situation here in town. Randall says that an infected bio team is on the way. The three of us are getting out of here while we still can. I am going to lock the station up and leave the key in the place we talked about. I won’t be here when you get here. I’m sorry, best of luck,” Janine said into the radio, then looked back up towards them. “Well, why are you two still standing there? You need to go get whatever it is you’re getting,” she said to them.
“Janine, Madison – Madison, Janine,” Quinn quickly introduced them to get that out of the way and looked towards the armory down the hall.
“I’ll get the guns and you two find any food and supplies you can. We meet out here in five minutes,” he said to them and ran off down the hall.
“Come on, follow me,” Janine said to her, and they went off in the other direction.
The armory door was locked, but Quinn just kicked it open. He ran in and grabbed a duffle bag off the shelf, unzipping it. Without thinking, he started putting every weapon and boxes of ammo he could find close to him in the bag in a blind panic.
When he was finished, he zipped it up and lifted the bag. It was heavier than he expected it to be, and even though he managed to do it, something in his shoulder snapped. Muscle ripped, he winced in pain, but now was not the time to slow down. He ignored it and made his way back down the hall.
The two women made it to the cafeteria and saw several things that they could take but quickly realized there was nothing to hold it in.
“Look for boxes, bags, anything,” Madison quickly said.
“Good thinking, M; let’s get to work. I’ll do water; you do solid foods. C
anned things are over there in the cupboards; can opener is on the second drawer beside the fridge, don’t forget it,” Janine said to her and walked off to look for a box. Madison ignored the shortened version of her name and just nodded.
The two of them went off to look for anything they could use. Janine knew for a fact that there were some old milk crates in a supply closet. She always hated carrying those things around because the hard plastic cut into her skin when she did. She rushed to the closet and opened the door. Just as she thought, two red ones were stacked on top of one another. She grabbed them and started back towards the kitchen.
Madison opened up every cupboard door she could find and brought out every canned anything to put on the counter. There wasn’t as much as she hoped there would be.
“Damn it, this place is emptier than my place back home sometimes,” she said to herself and tried to shake off memories of Patrick in a hurry as they crept back in. Janine came back in and saw the limited supplies she’d found so far and was not impressed. “Seven cans of tomato soup is all you found?” Janine asked as she put the crate on the counter.
“Yeah, this place is empty; does anyone shop for anything around here?” Madison replied as she dragged the crate to her and started throwing the cans in.
“Nope, most just bring their own stuff,” Janine replied and opened the fridge. It was almost as empty besides a half-filled case of bottled water at the bottom. Janine pulled it out, and after the last can of soup was put in, she put the water on top in a hurry. “Don’t forget the can opener,” Madison reminded her. Janine got it and put it into her pocket.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said as she did it. Madison picked the heavy crate up and Janine led her back to the main hall.
Quinn was waiting for them. “You’re late,” he said under some strain, still carrying the heavy bag over his shoulder. Quinn moved to the door and opened it just a little before shutting it just as fast.