He slid the tablet out, hoping for news on the Spain mission, and found an unopened notification. He moved to the door, flipping the deadbolt closed before checking the message. They’d done it! The Mason kid had actually pulled it off. The mine was destroyed, but the Gate remained.
Dex flicked the blinds open, staring at the inactive Gate looming in his suite’s view across the field. These things weren’t going to be simple to destroy, so maybe this Soares cat had the right idea about going inside. Dex could have volunteered himself for that job, but he assumed the captain had more experience and a better skillset for that type of task. It was likely Dex would access it, only to be caught and executed instantly, adding to the security of the gates.
It was still early afternoon, and Dex needed to find a way to sneak out of camp without anyone seeing him. It might be as simple as walking away, but these new alien reinforcements seemed to be watching closer than the previous postings.
The sound of their spaceship’s engines cut through the air, and Dex opened the door, finding Hansen sitting on his own steps the unit over. His hand was placed over his forehead, blocking the sun as he stared into the sky.
“What’s going on?” Dex asked.
“Something about one of their mines being attacked.” Hansen laughed, and Dex noticed the sunlight glint off a bottle in the man’s other hand. “Good for them. Who knew the Vermin had a spine. Maybe I was on the wrong side after all.” He took a long pull from the clear bottle.
Dex didn’t comment. “They look like they’re mounting a retaliation.”
“You know that west coast facility we found the location for in Jacksonville?” Hansen’s lisp was worse with the liquor in his system.
“Sure.”
“That’s where they’re going. Tonight. Late, from what I hear,” Hansen said.
“Are we going?” Dex asked.
The man sloppily shook his head. “Nope. We’re done.”
Dex didn’t engage. He watched the ships landing, three of them in total, and saw the line of two hundred or so alien soldiers begin piling into the first craft. He slipped back into his room and sent a warning to the Reclaimers. It might not be much, but it was about all the help Dex could offer them at the moment.
When he returned outside, pack on his shoulder, Hansen was gone. Dex walked along the three-story brick building, peered both directions, and began to jog. Away from the Detroit manufacturing plant, the Gateway, the Overseers, and hopefully from the Occupation. He was done with it all.
He almost reached a wooden fence that ran along the outer parking lot. It had a couple old rusted-out cars still parked there, and he glanced back to the Gateway one last time, before he hit something like a wall.
The alien stood firm, muscles flexing as it chittered loudly, shaking its head on its thick neck. Dex got the point. He almost reached for his gun, but something told him that wouldn’t end well. The alien motioned him toward the three landed spaceships, and he nodded, resigned to never break free of his oppressors’ hold over him.
The alien grabbed his duffel bag, tearing it open instead of unzipping it. He dumped the contents, the tablet falling to the concrete. Dex tensed. That held too many secrets. This was it…
The creature stomped a three-toed foot on it, crushing the screen. He shoved Dex forward, spewing out a series of words in his native tongue. The autumn day was hot, warmer than it should have been for this late in the season, and Dex was sweating in his leather jacket. He plodded along wordlessly, seeming to annoy the Overseer with his slow pace.
Every few steps, he was pushed forward angrily, but Dex didn’t speed up for it. They arrived at the field near the Gateway, and Dex cringed as he saw more and more aliens piling into the third vessel. They weren’t holding back on this attack. Dex hoped the west coast had received his message, because this was going to be a one-sided war otherwise. By the looks of things, it was going that direction regardless.
Hansen stood near the last ship, swaying in the breeze, the bottle still in his hand. His face was clammy and pale, his scar puckered and pink in the sunlight.
“Looks like we have one last task, Hunter.”
“Seems so,” Dex replied. His escort grunted, forcing Dex up the ramp and into the ship. It was filled with the aliens, their musky scent overwhelming. He fought the urge to gag and moved along the wall, trying to find a spot with fewer of the beasts huddled so close.
The ships rose from Detroit, and he wished he could have told the others their main US facility was currently unguarded, but that would only mess up Soares and the other Mason’s plans.
He closed his eyes, trying to breathe through his mouth as the alien vessel lurched from the ground, higher into the hot autumn sky.
Chapter 21
Zhao
Gregory Zhao was no coward, despite what that bastard Tom Mason said of him. He deflated, cursing himself for his harsh thoughts about a man who had given his life so willingly. He’d done it to give the surviving humans on the planet the chance to spark the flame of rebellion. He was torn between telling people—proving to them—that he hadn’t sat on the west coast for twenty-five years hiding away. That he wasn’t hoping the monsters would simply disappear like he was a child in bed squeezing his eyes closed and pulling the covers up tight to banish the nightmare. Instead, he wanted them to know he was a brave, cautious, and meticulous leader who was waiting for the conditions to become optimal.
Those conditions were far from perfect, but since the Mason boys had arrived, wanting to unite the world and retaliate, the decision to abandon their base was taken out of his hands.
For the last two days, ever since the credible intelligence about the impending attack had been argued over and eventually believed, the survivors of the human race had been ferried north and their one exhausted pilot pushed herself harder than he felt was safe.
Safer than staying put, he thought, wincing at the implied risk he left others in.
There was no hope, none at all, of evacuating everyone. To that end, the underground bunkers were filled with people and supplies, and only those able to maintain the fight were sent away in the desperate hope of keeping the machine of revolt turning.
Anyone not fighting had been asked to leave, intending to survive this latest threat as they had lived: by their own guile and strength of character.
Leading these hundreds of people was the big, strong Freeborn who had volunteered for every dangerous assignment and had been denied for a number of reasons. When he came to Zhao with this plan, he was surprised to be granted permission and asked to begin immediately. His people, the seemingly endless snake of humanity departing from a place they hoped was safe, now had a full day and a half head start on whatever atrocities were coming for them.
Zhao scoffed to himself in dark amusement at the fact that the warning of their impending annihilation had come from someone who only too recently had been an enemy of their race, a traitor to his own species, but it was that very duplicity which had prompted the laughter.
He stood, tugged down the vest he wore festooned with spare ammunition for his shotgun, and drained the dirty glass of rust-colored drink before pulling a face as the courage-enhancing substance infused his body with the resignation and will to fight to the end.
Gregory Zhao was no coward, and maybe those who saw him as one would live to tell the story that proved that once and for all.
Everyone, man and woman alike, who formed the small group intending to stay and defend the base for as long as possible was a volunteer. Considering their force was expecting this choice to be the final one of their lives, there were many of them.
They listened intently as Zhao laid out his plans for the stages of their defense. There was an air of informality to that briefing, an intimacy even, and more than one set of eyebrows went up when he unveiled the hidden weaponry at their disposal.
“You think we’ve been sitting idle for two decades?” he asked with a wry smile. “We cleaned out every military s
tation, warehouse, and armory within three hundred miles, and now these bastards are going to find that out the hard way.”
CONFIRM [EIGHTEEN] TARGETS LOCKED. FIRE? Y/N
The computer readout was visible through the dust he had hurriedly wiped from the screen. Zhao blew more dirt from the rubberized keyboard and stabbed a decisive finger onto the Y key. Almost immediately, the world hummed with a vibration difficult to describe for anyone not experiencing it firsthand.
Those four buildings, erected years before and carefully crafted to appear as derelict, hid four close-in weapons systems, and the evil and beloved see-wiz—described according to which end of the barrel you were lucky or unlucky enough to be on—barked and burped into life to rattle the unbelievably destructive projectiles toward the enemy ships and tore them into ruin.
The addition of those weapons, a project from an old naval engineer dead these past twelve years, took five years to complete and had been mostly forgotten about by others until now. Just the time to remove them from the destroyed naval ships and transport them to their current positions had been close to two years, and the remainder of the time was spent reconnecting them and ensuring the power supply was sufficient to make them operate properly.
Gregory Zhao was no coward, nor was he in any way a fool, so he kept his cards very close to his chest. The last two minutes had resulted in the biggest losses to the enemy since they’d occupied Earth. He had no time to dwell on that success and even less time to congratulate himself. He hit the keys for the preset controls that lowered the barrels and began a systematic clearing of their once fertile soil to destroy as much of the anticipated inbound alien ground forces.
The guns fired, taking their turn to blast out an overlapping burst so that the four guns played their own song for as long as their ammunition lasted. By the time they’d gone silent, Zhao and all of his remaining forces were long gone from the building controlling them, falling back through a tunnel to the main complex to activate the next part of the attack.
The tactics of that phase were as brutal as using fire as a weapon against people, but he felt no remorse when the cameras in the four tunnels coming from those turret positions filled with the shapes of fast-running aliens heading for what they thought was the command post.
When the camera displaying the inside of the room he had been in not ten minutes before showed a screen packed with confused aliens who saw no escape, he activated that second phase and remote detonated a series of charges that collapsed the tunnels from the outside in to bury scores of them under tons of dirt and rock to die far worse deaths than those torn into bloody ruin in the skies.
Zhao heard no whooping of excitement or delight from his volunteers, because this was the final stand and the only thing they knew for certain was that it would end one way or another.
They came. Wave after wave after wave of tall, muscular, hideous aliens all baring their teeth and firing their advanced weaponry blindly around corners as they fought through the complex room by room.
The speed of their advance slowed within minutes. From the third section onwards, every other door was rigged with a claymore mine or a grenade of varying description attached to the doorframe by sticky tape, and even in some cases with an open tub of some noxious substance like hydrochloric acid perched above a partly open door to injure and maim or otherwise delay their advance.
It worked. As hyped-up and aggressive as the aliens were, after seeing their own kind thrown down missing feet or arms, horribly burned or smoldering as the skin peeled from their faces made for all but a full halt of their advance.
Each door was carefully checked instead of being barged through for the attacker to risk becoming a casualty. Every corner was peered around instead of being rushed, so that by the time they encountered any humans, they were exhausted and worn down by the stress of fearing each footstep would invite further injury until they reached a massive, open chamber that seemed abandoned.
Jostling came from behind those at the front who were understandably more cautious than their comrades safely in the rear, until a single gunshot blew the face of one brave soldier apart. The call to advance, to rush the impudent enemy, sounded loud and clear and forced them to run into the large chamber roaring their challenges.
“Now?” a woman asked Zhao in a whisper without taking her eye from the scope of her rifle.
“Not yet,” he murmured, hoping for just a few more seconds to trap even more of them into the corridors of the complex, which made them stoop to avoid hitting their ugly heads on light fittings and door frames. “A few more seconds… Okay, now!”
The woman holding the rifle squeezed her right index finger around the trigger to spark a full advance into the hall.
“Wait for it,” Zhao said to a man beside him. “Wait for it… now!” The man twisted a lever on a battery box, which sent an electrical signal along a wire leading over the high ceiling. That wire was connected to a bomb seated securely in the ceiling above the far doorway, and when it blew, it dropped a few tons of rubble to block their escape and to prevent any other reinforcements from entering.
Leaving by far the least palatable but the most destructive task for his own hands, Zhao pulled a lever on the wall, which activated an isolated circuit of the complex’s sprinkler system. That isolated system dumped gallons of liquid into the hall, and that liquid was a mixture of rubbing alcohol, turpentine, paint thinner, and anything else recovered from the old world that burned.
He stepped from the crack of the door he peered through as it came under sporadic fire from the advancing invaders who were only just beginning to realize the rain inside wasn’t water. Before it was closed fully, he did something he’d always wanted to do since he was a kid. Since he’d watched movies from the seventies and eighties, when anyone setting light to something did so in such masculine fashion that he even saw what he was doing in special effects slow-motion.
The metal gas lighter he carried in his pocket despite never having smoked was raised, opened with a springy snick sound, and the wheel rolled over the flint to make fire. He tossed the lighter through the crack and the door slammed closed as the heavy whoomph from behind it threatened to bulge the door back open and allow the consuming fireball inside to reach its scorching tentacles out to them.
It held, but the shrill cries of agony and fear from the aliens trapped inside were haunting enough.
“Spread out to your fallback positions,” Zhao ordered, hearing his instructions relayed over at least two radios. “Fight to your last bullet, then use your gun as a damned club.” This was it for him, but he considered it one hell of a way to go.
Chapter 22
Dex
The aftermath of the battle was far different from the altercation. Dex stumbled from the hull of the ship, his hands trembling as the ground shook beneath them. Hansen smelled like sour sweat, and it appeared like the man was crying, but it was only the usual leak from his scarred eye.
“What the hell just happened?” Hansen croaked, speaking for the first time in at least ten minutes.
Dex shrugged, trying to keep his enthusiasm inside. “I’d say these Vermin know a thing or two about a fortified defense.”
Hansen’s expression was wild. “Jesus. We had this kind of artillery to defend ourselves with?”
“We?” Dex asked, fed up with the Occupation’s human leader. He peered around, not seeing any of the Overseers here. They’d evacuated the ships over an hour ago, leaving the two humans to fend for themselves. Lucky for Dex, the vessel was far enough away from the target zone that Zhao hadn’t blown them up.
“You know what I mean. Maybe I…”
Dex glanced over his shoulder, ensuring no one was around. He walked over to the evil man, standing directly in front of him. The smell of booze on his breath lingered. “God, I hate you, Hansen.”
“What?” the man stared at him, his bad eye drifting to the side.
“I said I hate you… I hate everything about you. I hate tha
t you killed Travis Mason all those years ago. I hate that you stood against humanity beside these freaks for this long.” Dex shoved him in the chest, knocking the man to the ground. He’d seen that Hansen was unarmed. He’d been drunk when they forced the two humans to join them, and clearly, the usually armed man had been caught off guard.
Dex, on the other hand, had his Glock ready, and he pulled it out now, pointing it at Hansen. Dex had done a lot of shit in his life. He’d hunted humans, lots of them, but he tried to tell himself the ones he’d murdered, like the pair guarding the University of Nebraska, had been for good reasons. That they’d deserved it. At the end of the day, if he died, and there was a heaven and hell, Dex had no misconceptions of which direction he was heading.
If there was a stairway to heaven, he was taking the express elevator straight to hell.
“What are you doing, Hunter?” Hansen tried to stand up, but Dex kicked his left leg out, sending him to the ground.
“I’m doing what someone should have done years ago.” His finger touched the trigger, and he caught movement from the ship behind him.
An alien sauntered forward, his eyes dark and menacing. He clicked a few times and glanced idly between the two humans. Dex could smell him, even over the acrid scent of detonated munitions permeating the air.
“He says to stand down.” Hansen’s eyes were wide.
“Is that so?” Dex asked, not wavering. He stared at the alien, recognizing that this was their commander. He’d been in charge, chirping shrill orders on the trip over, and it appeared he was the last one standing. At least over here, away from the fight. “Maybe you should tell him he’s a coward for sending all his people to their deaths while he took a nap inside.”
Hansen cleared his throat. “Lambert, lower the goddamn gun or you’ll get us both killed.”
Rise | Book 3 | Reclamation Page 14