The Exodus Towers: The Dire Earth Cycle: Two

by Jason M. Hough

  Skyler made a point to wait a few seconds before answering. The eagerness in Ana’s voice, and her brash actions during the assault on the ranch house, spelled trouble, he thought. If even a brief pause took some of the push out of her, he’d count it as progress.

  “When the Orbitals arrive,” Skyler said, feeling a twinge of bitter nostalgia at the slang term. “When their climber reaches the ground, Gabriel’s people will have their hands full. Lots of colonists to watch, and that moment of heightened alert when the climber doors open. All eyes will be on it. We’ll use this to our advantage.”

  “You have a plan, then, Skyler?” Davi asked.

  He nodded, and told them.

  Wilson and Vanessa had the least experience in handling firearms. The group balked when Skyler announced he would pair the two, but when he explained their role in the attack the murmuring stopped. This was not the time, Skyler argued, for weapons training, and he felt it best that the group’s strengths be used to full effect.

  For his part, Wilson didn’t seem to mind at all. He had a pacifist’s demeanor, and from the way he stole glances at Vanessa, Skyler guessed the kid was already romanticizing the mission to come.

  Vanessa just shrugged. “Twenty years of jujitsu,” she said with a laugh. “A lot of good that’s done me.”

  He gave the two of them their marching orders and turned to the rest of the group.

  Davi, Elias, and Pablo would team together, he explained.

  “What about Ana?” Davi asked.

  “She’s with me,” Skyler said. He fixed Davi with a hard stare that he hoped conveyed the reason. Davi would be too distracted with protecting his reckless sister, and Skyler wanted none of that. Young as he was, Davi had proved himself in combat, and all of that skill would be needed.

  Whether the young man understood or not, Skyler couldn’t tell. Davi looked to Ana, studied her, then turned back to Skyler and gave a grudging nod.

  “You three,” Skyler said, “will come in from the west. Ana and I, from the east. We move when Wilson and Vanessa’s distraction is in full swing.”

  “And when do we start?” Wilson asked.

  Skyler glanced upward. “When you see the first vehicle from space about to reach the bottom. Say, twenty meters from the ground. We’ll give Gabriel and his people as many problems to juggle as possible, and use their confusion to our advantage.”

  The finer points of the plan were laid out, debated, refined. Elias commented twice that it would be better if everyone stayed together, but the rest of the group liked Skyler’s plan. Come from every side, split up and confuse the enemy, get the colonists to join the fight from within.

  An hour later, Skyler and Ana set out. Their trek was the longest, and Skyler had a few things he wanted to scavenge along the way. No goodbyes were said when they left, just some quiet well-wishes. Ana gave her brother a peck on each cheek, and tousled his hair when his frown didn’t vanish.

  “Be safe,” Davi said to her, but his eyes were on Skyler.

  “The greatest treasure in all of Belém,” Skyler said with a mock bow.

  Ana peered inside the building with a skeptical frown.

  “I’ll show you,” he added, and wiggled through the security gate he’d torn open a month earlier with a crowbar. A gate that had, for years, saved the store and its contents from looters.

  The dusty beam of his flashlight swept across a large banner hung on the back wall. AVENTURA NA AMAZÔNIA, it read. And below, SUPRIMENTOS DE SOBREVIVÊNCIA.

  Row upon row, rack after rack, of high-end quality camping and survival gear lay before them.

  Ana whistled, her eyes wide. Exactly how I felt, Skyler thought. He’d found the building ten days after initial landfall. Windows boarded, doors chained. Pristine, if a bit musty.

  The girl crept inside and strolled slowly down the nearest aisle, past rolled sleeping bags, air mattresses still in boxes, tents of every size and color, and bundled blankets. She ran her hand along an entire wall of hiking boots, and picked up a bundle of climbing rope, price tag still attached. Skyler left her to wander, grabbed a fresh duffel bag from one shelf, and set about finding the items his plan required.

  When Ana returned to him she sported a new vest, a pair of sunglasses, and a water bottle with filtration built into the cap. A confused smirk grew on her lips as she watched Skyler strip two mannequins of their fashionable survival gear.

  “You want us looking good when we attack?” she asked.

  In answer he disassembled the mannequins and stuffed their torsos and heads inside his bag. Her smirk turned to a knowing smile when she saw the rest of the duffel’s contents.

  “Let’s go,” Skyler said. “Plenty of time to ransack this place later.”

  “Just a second,” Ana replied. She went to a rack near the cash registers and selected two more items: a pair of thin, tight leather gloves and a wide-brimmed olive-green hat.

  “My hands get sweaty,” she explained. “When I hold a gun, I mean. And now that the rains have gone, the sun makes me squint.”

  She put the hat on and stuffed the black gloves into the new vest she’d pilfered, a journalist’s vest in desert tan. When she realized Skyler was watching her, she flashed him a thumbs-up and winked. In that moment she looked markedly younger than her twenty-two years, so much so that Skyler toyed with the idea of leaving her here, safe and out of harm’s way. Hadn’t she earned the right to that foolish abandon only young people can get away with? Those years had been robbed from her, after all. The battle to come was too much to ask of someone who’d lost what she had. Her parents, her world. Her youth. And even if they succeeded it would only be to face the thing that loomed in the rainforest. The cave. The black-clad subhuman with glowing red eyes.

  But when her smile vanished, Skyler saw only Ana the survivor. She became a woman of startling maturity, a woman who’d been through unimaginable terrors over the last five years. That a fire of youthful recklessness still burned in there filled Skyler with a sudden sadness that he couldn’t explain. The world he knew had no room for innocence anymore. Maybe that’s why he’d never had similar thoughts concerning Samantha. All the innocence had long since been bled out of her. Somehow Ana still clung to it with a white-knuckled grip.

  For the next few hours he led her on a winding path through Belém’s ruined streets. Rain, the mortal enemy of asphalt, had turned the avenues and alleys into a moonscape of potholes and cracks. Littered on top were derelict vehicles of every size and shape. Trucks, cars, and buses. Many flipped on their side, or impaled into the side of a building. Some had skeletons inside, and more littered the road.

  Skyler shook his head. Much of the carnage that occurred in those first days of the disease was due to panic and mass hysteria. A few infections in a city like this, even just the rumor of such, would have spurred the entire population into a desperate race to flee, riot, or hide. He’d mused, in nightly debates with Skadz during their own surreal journey to Darwin, that the disease’s reputation had been just as deadly as the brain-crushing infection it carried. Skadz, the first immune Skyler met after discovering his own invulnerability to the disease, had a knack for stating things plainly. “We humans are a skittish bunch, that’s a fact,” the Melville’s original captain had said.

  Soon they reached the city’s border, where urban press met the imposing green wall of the rainforest, like two armies frozen in the initial clash of their front lines. Buildings and shanty homes gave way to a wall of emerald trees that fronted the dark, endless forest.

  He paused there and glanced up at the zenith of the sky. Ana, at his shoulder, did the same.

  A few meager clouds dotted the vast blue expanse, but above the view was clear. He thought he could see the Elevator cord, or hints of it. The hair-thin cable was hard to detect when no traffic marked its path, and his eyes often played tricks on him when he sought it. Being so close to the equator, Belém’s cord didn’t slope nearly as much as Darwin’s did, but that didn’t make the t
ask much easier. Straight up still wasn’t quite the right place to look. He scanned the sky for a moment just to be sure. There were no climbers yet visible. Tania, if she was indeed coming, was still hours away.

  “Plenty of time,” he said. “Let’s keep moving.”

  Skyler followed a deliberately wide route toward their destination, always with a wary eye on the cloud that clung to the forest canopy a few kilometers south. The white haze loomed well off to their right, visible through the occasional break in foliage. If Ana saw the strange fog, she didn’t mention it.

  That place should be our focus, he thought. If Gabriel had brought a thousand trained killers down on the base camp, it wouldn’t fill Skyler with the same dread as the subhuman he’d seen inside the cave. But he knew the colony must be liberated first if they were to have any hope of finding out the nature of that creature, and the ship from which it came.

  The sun shimmered low on the horizon when their path brought them to the shore of the Guamá. With wet season gone, and the worst of the rains with it, the river’s angry brown churn had given way to a more tranquil surface that reflected some of the sky above.

  He glanced up again. At the sky’s zenith, a small dark object seemed to hang in the sky, like the opposite of a star. “There they are,” he whispered.

  Ana put her hand on his back. “How long do we have?”

  “Two hours. Maybe three.”

  They took a ten-minute break from their hike. Ana produced two granola bars from her backpack and handed Skyler one. They ate in silence, both watching the climber above. After he finished the tasteless snack, Skyler swallowed a few gulps of cool water from his canteen, and Ana copied him.

  He turned off the dirt road when he found a game trail through the dense foliage near the shore. Thick vines and roots lined the ground like veins, and branches spanned the narrow trail every few meters. Their pace slowed to a crawl, but Skyler wasn’t worried.

  An hour later he spotted the smuggler’s boathouse. He led Ana inside and instructed her to be silent for a moment. For five long minutes he sat perfectly still, crouched in the doorway of the tiny shed, listening. Birds, whispering branches, and the gentle lapping of the river against the shore were all he heard.

  “Let’s get to work,” he said, and closed the door.

  Belém, Brazil

  6.MAY.2283

  AN HOUR LATER, the inflatable raft slipped out from the boathouse and into the river’s current.

  The two occupants sat side by side, facing the northern shore. One hunched over a hunting rifle, the other at the sniper’s shoulder, a pair of binoculars pressed to a hooded face.

  Skyler and Ana watched the boat drift away. In the waning sun, the mannequins looked a bit silly to his eye. He could only hope that the craft would drift out from the shore far enough that the ruse would work. If it bought them ten seconds of confusion, he’d consider the effort worthwhile.

  “It’s moving fast,” Ana noted, an urgency in her voice.

  And she was right. The current picked up pace a few meters from the shore, and in no time the boat began to bounce along nearly twice as fast as the leaf Skyler had used as a test run. If the craft beat them to base camp, and the diversion worked, it would be wholly wasted.

  Skyler ran. He swept aside vines and ducked under branches, tripped twice on roots. Ana, right on his heels, helped him up the first time, and toppled onto him the second. She giggled as they untangled themselves.

  Soon the game trail turned north, and Skyler had no choice but to push into the dense foliage that stood between them and base camp. He shot alternating glances at the tiny raft, which drifted along thirty meters ahead of them, and the climber car that ambled down the Elevator cord straight ahead. The vehicle was only a few hundred meters from the ground now and seemed to be racing the sun to the horizon. The sky blazed crimson, putting the climber in stark silhouette.

  Skyler turned to Ana and raised a finger to his lips. A few steps later they came upon the stream that bordered the colony on its eastern edge. Skyler did not stop to look at the camp, tempting though it was to study the enemy’s positions. He turned sideways and jogged down the embankment, one hand trailing the sloped mud wall for balance. Ana stopped at the top, her eyes wide as she took in the tent city on the other side of the stream, but her senses returned soon enough and she bounded down the slope. Skyler waited at the bottom for her to break her momentum, lest she splash into the meter-deep rivulet and give their approach away.

  At the bottom of the ditch, Skyler unslung his rifle and made sure it was loaded, half his attention on Ana as she did the same. In the dwindling light, her expression showed no fear. He even saw a hint of a smirk on the corners of her mouth. When she flashed him the a-okay, her eyes sparkled.

  He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and impress on her the danger they were about to walk into. He wanted to tell her this all wasn’t some game. And he wanted to kiss her, he realized, a desire he quickly banished to the farthest corner of his mind.

  Skyler shambled up the other side of the sloped ditch on his hands and knees, using his fists to keep dirt and debris from clumping on his palms and fingers. He crawled the last meter until his head just poked above the slope and the camp came into view.

  The colonists all sat on the ground on the southern edge of camp, near the river. Skyler counted three armed guards circling them, weapons held at the ready. One of Gabriel’s APC’s was parked near the prisoners, its bright headlights trained on them. Most of the captives sat facing away from the blinding beams, which left their faces in shadow. Even from here, two hundred meters away, Skyler could tell they sat on their hands. He wondered if they were bound, but he thought it unlikely.

  Behind the glow of the vehicle’s lights, he thought he could see the outline of one more guard, sitting atop the vehicle.

  And beyond that, he saw the barricaded pen that housed the aura towers. The alien devices were crowded together. Too many of them, Skyler thought. Gabriel and his people must have gathered as many as they could, taken down Mercy Road and Water Road in an effort to give their prisoners nowhere to run.

  At the center of the camp stood perhaps ten of the immunes, black-clad and armed. They arrayed themselves in a loose circle, centered on the base of the Elevator—the black alien disk that resembled a gear laid on its side. Portions of the intruders’ circle were obscured by the large tents and modified cargo containers that ringed the Elevator’s connection point.

  Around the northern edge of the colony, the bulk of Gabriel’s vehicles were still parked in a wide half circle, only now they faced outward. Their headlights were off, and in the half-light of the setting sun Skyler couldn’t tell how many guards patrolled there. At least as many as in the circle around the Elevator, perhaps more. A handful of aura towers were interspersed between them, giving the border an odd similarity to a castle wall.

  “Do you see Gabriel?” he whispered to Ana.

  “Not yet,” came her reply. “Wait, there, near the—”

  A shout went up. Skyler almost leapt out of his skin at the sudden noise.

  The yell came from the southern edge of camp, near where the prisoners sat. He glanced there and motion in the river caught his eye. A raft.

  The raft! He’d almost forgotten. The inflatable boat ambled along, fifty meters offshore. In the near darkness the ruse couldn’t look more perfect. Two shadows, and just the hint of a rifle poking out from one. A BB gun, in truth. Skyler smiled.

  The guards near the prisoners shouted and pointed, and those near the center of camp yelled back. A few broke from the circle to run in that direction.

  “Get ready,” Skyler said.

  “Oh, no,” Ana whispered.

  He was about to ask her what she meant when the rocket launched.

  It came from the vehicle that stood sentry over the prisoners. Or, rather, from the guard who sat atop. A deep WHUMP preceded the launch, a sound Skyler knew well from the Purge. Then blinding light from the projectil
e’s tail put the entire camp in daylight for a scant second. A single second was all the time it took for the weapon to knife through the air, hissing as it flew, leaving a straight line of smoke in its wake.

  The raft erupted in a fireball that roiled up into the sky, reflected in the water below. Bits of raft and debris rained down into the river and onto shore.

  Then the shooting started.

  Gunfire rattled from the southwest, toward the docks. Davi, Pablo, and Elias, too far away to see, had started their attack early.

  Skyler glanced northwest. “C’mon, Wilson. Where are you?”

  He saw nothing there, heard nothing. As with any battle plan, Skyler recognized the moment when it all went out the window. “Time to improvise,” he muttered, and came to a crouch. “Cover me.”

  In answer Ana settled onto the slope, her rifle at the ready. Inside its grenade launcher were the last three rounds they had, and her role would require the use of each.

  Skyler ran at a crouch to the nearest tent, aware that the camp now flirted with chaos, exactly as he’d hoped. Gabriel’s people were in disarray. Some held their circle near the camp’s center, some ran for the river, others for the docks where gunfire still raged.

  When he reached the tent, Skyler went to a knee and glanced back, ready for Ana to unleash her first grenade.

  She wasn’t there. He scanned the embankment in both directions and saw no sign of her.

  “Shit, shit,” he muttered. Where the hell was she? He felt trapped, caught between the urge to go back and find her, and the desire to press on. He knew she wouldn’t have spooked and retreated. More likely, she’d run headlong into the northern portion of the camp, the recklessness Davi had warned about on full display. Maybe it had been a mistake to ask her to sit on the periphery and attack from afar.

  A horrific sound whipped Skyler’s attention around. The smash of metal and breaking glass, followed by a wrenching grind so loud it made his teeth hurt.

  For a split second he thought the climber had fallen to the ground, and his heart skipped a beat at the idea of Tania inside, falling to her death. But when he glanced up he saw the vehicle above, still dawdling downward, now just thirty meters from the ground.