“We can't outgun them,” Dagos said.
“So we gotta outrun them.” Sledge knew the drill.
“Turn around ASAP. Fig and Ninth is our only shot.”
“ASAP coming right up,” Sledge cried, turning so sharply the car lifted a few inches off the ground.
“Your window,” Dagos said as they leveled.
Sledge rolled it down and fired off two rounds from his pistol then leaned back to let Dagos continue their minor offense. She popped the tire off the Komodo van bringing up the rear and watched it veer off before fixing her sights on an Anunnaki skiff ten feet above. Dark gray adamantine shielding and the poor angle limited her shots and she pulled back to lower her window.
Bits of aluminum broke off from the hood as the Anunnaki let loose a storm of pulse surges.
“At least we know they're not trying to kill us,” Sledge said.
Just take us hostage, so they can probe us.
A blue and white street sign read 7th St. Almost.
From below, the skiffs resembled the bottom of a boat's hull. Except with more metal, alien symbols, and opaque anti-gravity orbs. A bolt-action rifle wouldn't punch through those, but she didn't have a better target.
She focused on one and got off three successive hits before a pulse surge sent tiny steel bits off the van door and splintering into her elbow. She winced, but somehow felt less pain than she'd expected. Withdrawing into the van, she slapped a fresh magazine into the rifle.
Dozens of holes decorated the van's ceiling and offered a better firing angle. A foolish Anunnaki was peeking down with its head. She zeroed in, but it retreated before she could score a hit.
“Shit,” Sledge said dully.
Dagos looked to see an Anunnaki hunter drone hovering in front of them. A pair of heavy-duty resonance blaster cannons fixed on them. Too quick to stop, the machine emitted deep booming hums. Just like that, the hood popped up with a burst of smoke, the transmission growled, and the van began slowing dramatically.
“We better hightail it outta this thing,” Sledge said, his frown full of alarm.
They needed more than that. Dagos racked her mind for a real plan, but couldn't think of anything. She lacked geographical knowledge of this area and the Anunnaki could simply drop in and manhandle them once they were out of the van. Scraps of old faded paper fluttered in the wind. Posters with the Lakers and Clippers logos.
She vaguely recognized the Los Angeles basketball teams.
Then she noticed the wall of aluminum sheets, cinder block, and plywood panels fifty meters down the stretch, past a few deserted houses and cars that had been stripped clean.
An old signpost read STAPLES CENTER.
She grabbed the wheel and turned right. The van made it thirty feet in the direction of the wall before it came to a complete stop.
“Follow the old posters,” Dagos said, hopping out and rattling off the rest of her ammo. Then she abandoned the gun and broke into a full sprint.
Ham had briefed them on the major landmarks of the city. If this was what she suspected, she could buy them some time.
Suddenly, something moved in the window of an overturned RV in front of them. She made out a small child staring back at her. A tanned girl who couldn't have been older than seven. Best case scenario the Anunnaki ignored the kid and moved on. She preferred not to think about the worst-case scenario. Unfortunately, she knew from experience that it was far more likely.
Forget it and keep moving, Commander Ham's voice echoed.
She had a lot of blood on her hands and she wouldn't add one more child to that.
“We're saving that girl,” she said, swooping over to the RV and clambering to the open passenger door. Even as pulse surges battered the paint job, she lowered her hand through the doorway. “Come on, sweetie.”
The girl ran over, smiling. “Sucker!”
Bewildered, Dagos could only watch as the girl ripped the designator off her wrist. When the girl turned and ran to the end of the bus, the Komodo symbol emblazoned on the back of her t-shirt came into view.
“Move!” Sledge yelled, wrapping his hands around Dagos and shoving her off the bus.
That brought her to the here and now. She sprinted ahead, still in disbelief at what she'd witnessed. Blood mobs had corrupted even the damn children. But of course they had. She'd seen children corrupted all over the world.
Commander Ham winked at her in her mind's eye. Forget it and keep moving.
Back to searching for an escape.
“Look for a hole in the wall,” she cried as Anunnaki soldiers jumped off the skiffs. Old cars and piles of debris served as their only real protection.
As Sledge brought up the rear, questions raced through her head. Was he still a necessary asset for this mission? Would he be better off if he aborted his role in this op? Part of her wanted to leave him behind and trick the Anunnaki into chasing her and her only. Of course, she knew they wouldn't let him escape. And she did still need his help. No matter how good she appeared in the videos, she was only as good as her team.
Sledge ejected a few rounds from his pistol as they slipped through the branches of an uprooted tree. The Anunnaki soldiers paused for a second, too large to get through, then smashed through the weaker branches with their shields.
They skirted around a bus, the skiffs still tracking them overhead, the Anunnaki soldiers gaining purchase every second. If the aliens so much as touched them, they could knock them out. And that would be game over. Dagos would wake up in an alien prison. This time, Sledge wouldn't be able to break her free.
A single chain-link fence separated them from the wall.
“Ladies first,” Sledge said, diving in and yanking a chunk free. Dagos crawled through without looking back.
Feet later, Sledge fell in step as they scanned for an opening in the hodgepodge wall.
“You're nuts,” Sledge grunted.
“I know,” Dagos said, turning over her shoulder. Her blood froze. The Anunnaki soldiers were less than twenty feet behind. They'd close the gap in seconds.
“Right there,” Sledge yelled. She saw it, too. A piece of cardboard among the layer of cinder blocks. It had to be a way through the wall. A way in.
She ran in head-first, half-expecting to hit cinder block behind the cardboard. But as her hands and head met the cardboard, it gave and a tunnel extended before her. Down she slid. Into the Sore. Where a dirty bomb carved out a crater of death and ruin two years ago.
14
This time, Courtney awoke to a sharp brief pain in her arm. She looked to a syringe falling away.
Her body was oddly situated. She was suspended on a vertical panel, metal braces keeping her limbs attached magnetically at the joints.
Cold fingers wrapped around her chin and dragged her face forward. Up close, tiny cracks and ridges tarnished the overseer's scales.
“What was that?” she cried, at once aware of the swirling in her head.
“Every time the air level in your body changed, I let you fall unconscious then injected you with what was necessary to sustain your life.” Overseer Drekken motioned to the syringe. “But this is a drug that will prevent you from going unconscious.”
“What?”
“Soon you'll begin suffocating again. We'll inject you with only enough oxygen to prevent death. But the intense pain you felt from suffocation won't go away. I'll let it go on for five minutes. If that doesn't persuade you, we'll up the duration of your suffocation.”
She fought back against an instinctive wave of panic. As soon as she panicked this was over. Instead, she drew a deep breath and tried to calm her mind. To focus on anything else. Like the old chamber they'd returned her to. She was on an elevated platform encapsulated by a resonance field. Beyond that the walls and ceilings looked like they were made of endless rows upon rows of over-sized rib bones complete with vein webbing. Except it was all composed of metal of varying shades of black. The Anunnaki had nailed the creepy torture chamber vibe.
/> “I don't know what data you have on human anatomy,” she said. “But when I was younger, I had a heart condition. If you keep this probing going, you might kill me before I reveal the Conifers' locations.”
The overseer had to think about that one. He must've suspected the lie, weighing it with the chances she was telling the truth.
“So, I guess I'll have to call off all probing,” he said deadpan. Then he hissed in amusement. “Is that what you expected me to say? If you die, you die.”
Groaning inwardly, Courtney gathered her thoughts. “I expected you to give me some time to recover. My life has to be worth a few hours, right? Or at least, the knowledge in my head is worth that.”
This Overseer Drekken seemed genuinely willing to consider. He said something to himself in Nebirian, then to her, “Three hours and I resume.”
As he roamed off, a tinge of hope crept into her consciousness. She'd successfully bought herself time, but she needed to do more than that.
Suddenly, the restraints on her wrists and ankles retracted. She hopped off the metal panel and spun around to see it flattening into the floor.
Obviously, her prison bubble didn't leave her much to work with. But there had to be something to use.
Look for the change in your environment, the Anunnaki Orun told her at Groomlake once. Study that change. Analyze it. What changed about her environment here?
She gazed at the resonance field that formed a giant bubble over the platform. Every so often it flickered. The Eagle once told her she'd met a prisoner who claimed some pattern existed between a resonance field and an Anunnaki base's electrical frequency. The frequency of the electrical charge was the special code that allowed the Anunnaki to palm walls and form openings. It changed occasionally in most bases.
She hadn't really bothered to work it out the pattern in the other prison chamber because she didn't have anything to replicate an Anunnaki electrical charge. No generator or Anunnaki designator to tweak. It would be like when her friend snatched up keys to a car that had no gas. And, thanks to the war, most gas stations were out of service. If she owned a designator and some equipment to toy with it, she might be able to make use of that pattern.
She bit her lip. This was a pointless exercise in frustration. Yet, it occurred to her that if the Eagle did get inside, she might be able to make use of the electrical frequency. It was a long-shot, but better than nothing. She fixated on the resonance field around her, noting the length between shifts in the balance of its composition.
15
Dagos pushed herself up with trembling arms. A giant crater spun around her. She massaged her head and realized that was just her vision. She had slid through the tunnel and tumbled until she hit dirt.
Sledge groaned beside her. “Well, no Anunnaki.”
She remembered escaping them. That was the good news.
“We've got about half an hour to figure a way out of here,” she said, referring to the buildup of radiation. In the days after the dirty bomb exploded, the government and pharmaceutical companies had distributed experimental anti-cancer medication, letting some of the survivors' bodies acclimate to the heightened radiation. But the last she'd heard blood mobs had destroyed the plant that produced those pills.
Even thirty minutes would raise their risk of cancer by a lot. Any longer than thirty minutes guaranteed a more immediate death.
“With all due respect, if our plan was survival, I don't know if coming here was the best idea,” Sledge said.
Dagos turned around and shifted her weight from foot to foot, taking inventory of her body. No bones were broken. “I know this was stupid. If we stayed, we'd be dead.”
Sledge issued a long sigh and looked around. “Let's get started then.”
They began their march through the crater.
“So, did Mitch betray us or did these guys betray Mitch?” she wondered aloud.
“Sometimes it’s not betrayal,” Sledge said. “Could be that he mistakenly judged them as nicer people than they were. He thought they'd do him a favor, but maybe they never really agreed.”
For some reason, she felt silly for assuming it was a betrayal. A tinge of guilt rose in her again. Maybe the reason you distrust people so much is because you know what you're capable of.
“How many designators are we down now?” from her teammate.
“Two.”
“At least that puts things into perspective,” Sledge said, drawing his revolver. “Where's the closest exit?”
“West of here,” Dagos said. “But I think we better get some cover first.”
The Anunnaki would send in aerial drones soon, no doubt. They wouldn't risk the lives of their soldiers down here, though. Not when they only needed to wait half an hour.
She decided not to bring up the fact that the exit was going to be heavily guarded.
What struck her about the Sore was the debris. This was what remained of the Staples Center and Los Angeles Convention Center. Old support pillars, the skeletal frames of underground parking structures, stairwells all by themselves. Chunks of the bleachers, ravaged structural frames with concession stands still intact on the second or third floor, the stadium video screen. If you studied it, you could create a rudimentary map of where things had been.
Dagos had witnessed a lot of destruction. By now, she'd grown numb to the horror of wide-scale destruction.
The shock came at seeing the remains of the people. Long-dead corpses strewn around, some still wearing their jerseys or sports memorabilia. The elements had reduced most to skeletons and only an occasional fly bothered landing on them.
Fighting back her revulsion, she walked up to a ravaged souvenir shop with racks of paper-thin clothing still hanging.
“Those won't do us much good for blending in,” Sledge said as they skirted around a few bodies near the front of the store.
Dagos poked around the debris. Oddly, she discovered a few cardboard boxes in good shape, but they'd already been cleaned out. Finally, she found an untouched one at the bottom of a pile. The tape had shriveled away and she popped it open. Old Lakers clothes still rested in the bags.
They tore open a bag and outfitted themselves in Lakers jerseys and gray sweat pants. Sledge grabbed a pair of blue Dodgers caps for them off a shelf and they donned them. Now they looked like locals to any Anunnaki aerial surveillance.
They kept to the edges of the crater, where the debris formed a slope upwards. Dagos hoped that this would both limit their exposure to the radiation. But also, the inhabitants. Most would've lived in what remained of the Convention Center. Several halls were still intact, if not half-buried in dirt.
Twenty minutes must've passed when they spotted their tents, sleeping bags, and clotheslines. And finally, the Frayed.
Even from a hundred feet away, she could see the burns and sores on their faces. No wonder they called this place the Sore. Ham told her some of the experimental pills would keep them alive, but it wouldn't stop all the deteriorating effects of radiation poisoning.
“Poor bastards,” Sledge said.
Dagos cleared her throat. “Don't lower your guard.”
“You really think...”
“Anyone can potentially be a threat. We both know that.”
She took Sledge's silence as an admission and they pressed on over the hills of debris, keeping to the ridges and cliffs to limit their visibility to the Frayed. If the Anunnaki spotted them, she could only hope they saw two Frayed drifters and thought no more of it. More than likely, they'd assume, regardless, that they were headed for the west gate. It was the main exit route. If they had more time, they could ask the Frayed about others. But she wasn't about to risk that.
Without warning, a raucous broke out. Gunfire and pulse surges. Definitely outside of the crater. Dagos couldn't quite pinpoint it. But with a sinking sensation, she knew it must've been the Anunnaki overtaking the guard post that kept the Frayed stuck inside.
“Unless we can find another escape route, we're as good
as dead,” Sledge said.
She racked her mind for another way, but he was right. They wouldn't make it to the other side of the Sore in time. They would have to go to the exit with the Anunnaki or succumb to radiation poisoning.
Then something moved in the corner of her eyes. They looked up to see a figure waving to them from the top of the wall. Not an Anunnaki. A human.
A black rope unraveled over the side, inviting them to leave.
“Freedom!” someone yelled.
Further down the slope, three men with vein-ridden, beat-red faces emerged from behind a splintering desk. Dagos couldn't believe they were being tracked and hadn't caught on. Then she saw why. Each man wore military tactical gear. Kevlar, Arctic camo sleeves and pants, elbow and shoulder pads. Frayed, but former-Special Forces.
“You two, hands up,” a bald-shaven man with a crooked nose barked, shouldering a suppressed MK16 SCAR-L. A red dot appeared over Dagos's chest.
Another trained his laser sights on Sledge. The third had his carbine trained up at the figure on the wall.
“We're Snake-eaters. Sent by the US government,” Dagos said, lifting her arms wearily. “What's your name, soldier?”
“Good. We've got some payback to deliver. And my name's Wilson.”
“Why's that?” Sledge asked.
“Isn't it obvious? Your government abandoned us here. Left us to die. You can either denounce your government or take our places.”
He was clearly American, but his use of your made her wonder if he hadn't done something so bad he no longer considered himself such. Either that or he truly felt betrayed.
“Sorry, but I think that rope was meant for us,” Sledge said.
“Maybe it was, but we've got families to find,” Wilson said, his tone verging on desperate.
Dagos clenched her jaw. A former-Special Forces soldier desperate to see his family was more dangerous than any blood mob soldier.
The Eagle's Last Stand Page 7