“Don’t worry. It’s booby trapped,” Huff said. “We didn’t survive out here this long by being stupid.”
“Tomb,” Tank grumbled, shaking his head. “Goddamn, tomb, I tell ya’.”
Garcia’s eyes flitted from the shutters to the ceiling while Fitz tried to figure out what Tank was talking about.
“You led us into a tomb,” Tank said. “Ain’t no way we’re all gettin’ out of here.”
“Yankee 1, Ghost 1. You got room for civilians? Over?”
Beckham waited for the pilot's reply anxiously.
The other Blackhawks were already fifteen minutes ahead, but he was hoping one might have the balls and the juice to turn around for Fitz, Garcia, Tank, Meg and the others.
“Negative, Ghost 1. Running low on fuel. Command has given us strict orders to return to home plate.”
Beckham kicked the bulkhead, drawing the glares of several children. The closer he looked, he saw the kids weren’t glaring at all. They were staring right through him. Catatonic.
The troop hold had transformed into a daycare for kids ranging from ages between three and twelve. Wilson and Harms were checking them for injuries. Horn was back on the floor with Tasha and Jenny.
Kate put her hand on Beckham’s arm. He softened at her touch. This time she didn’t say a word. The warmth from her fingers was enough to relieve some of Beckham’s frustration, but not enough to get him to sit. He made his way back to the cockpit.
“How far out are we?”
Lewis kept his eyes on the controls. “Thirty minutes, sir.”
Beckham switched his comm channels to Central. “Lieutenant Davis, this is Ghost 1, do you copy? Over.”
Davis came online a moment later, her voice stern. “Copy that, Ghost 1. What’s your ETA?”
“Thirty minutes. You got a plan to evacuate our boys in the field, LT?” She didn’t seem to respond well to requests, so he framed it as a question.
“Negative, Ghost 1. Manhattan is way too hot right now. Can’t risk the resources.”
You got to be fucking kidding me.
Beckham clenched his jaw, doing his best not to curse at a superior officer. That wouldn’t get him anywhere.
“LT, we got about a dozen civilians and four of our own in that tower. Isn’t that worth the risk?”
There was a pause, static bleeding from the comm channel.
“Not my call, Master Sergeant. See you when you get back.”
Beckham bowed his head, containing his frustration through a discreet sigh. He had to keep it together. But he also couldn’t leave them out there.
Lewis glanced back at him. “Sorry, but Lieutenant Davis is right. That building was crawling with Variants. We’re lucky we got out of there in time.”
Beckham narrowed his eyes at the sky. Heat lightning danced across the horizon, illuminating the ocean below. The blue residue faded away, and darkness swallowed the view.
Think, Reed. There has to be a way to bring them home.
Lewis turned back to the windshield, and Beckham retreated to the troop hold without uttering another word. He took a seat next to Kate and put a hand on her leg.
Horn wrapped his arms around his girls, but didn’t look over at Beckham. He leaned in and whispered something in Jenny’s ear. Apollo was camped out in the middle of the kids. His presence seemed to calm them. One girl stroked his head and said, “Good doggy.”
In total there were thirteen kids. The farther the helicopter took them from Manhattan, the more likely it would be that they’d all become orphans. It was a sacrifice his team had been willing to make.
A voice crackled in his earpiece. “Beckham, you copy?”
Beckham stiffened and cupped a hand over his ear to hear. “Copy. Beckham here. That you, Fitz?”
“Yeah. We’re holed up in an apartment on the twenty-eighth floor of this building. It’s me, Meg, twelve civvies, Tank, and Garcia.”
“Goddamn good to hear your voice,” Beckham said. “I’m working on getting you a bird.”
“Not sure how much time we got.”
“Just hold them off, Fitz. Hold them off as long as you can.”
“Will do, boss.” There was sadness in his voice. He paused and then said, “I’ll give ‘em hell.”
“I’ll see you soon, brother.”
The comm channel went dead, and Beckham rested his head on Kate’s shoulder. Helpless and exhausted, he felt defeated.
Horn got his attention with a snort. “How the hell are we going to get them out of that building, boss?”
Beckham shook his head. He didn’t have an answer. The Variants would find a way inside, and when they did, Beckham doubted Fitz, Meg, and the two remaining Variant Hunters would be able to stop them.
Kate kissed Beckham on the cheek. He put his arm around her and pulled her close. Holding her was something he never thought he would do. A single sob worked its way out of his throat.
You get to save some of them. But you can't save them all.
But Fitz was his brother, and he cared deeply for Meg, Tank, and Garcia. Leaving them out there to die wasn’t going to happen. He’d save them…somehow.
Sirens blared from the public address system. A voice recalled all sailors to their stations. Ellis and Yokoyama remained in Lab A, staring at the monitor in disbelief.
“Gas her, gas her!” Yokoyama yelled. Whoever was in charge of Lucy’s cell followed the orders. A cloud of swirling smoke hissed into the room. The wall-mounted video camera had been splintered and knocked away by Lucy’s tongue, but Ellis could still see beyond the web of cracks onscreen.
“Get her back inside! Don’t let her escape!”
Ellis had the channel on open and picked up the voices of Sergeant Russo and his men. Gunfire broke from the speakers a moment later. The shotgun blasts echoed through the guts of the ship. Ellis could hear each shot.
“Aim for her legs!” shouted another man.
“Sergeant Russo, you have permission to eliminate hostile,” came a voice from Command. “I repeat, eliminate hostile. Do not let her out.”
The channel filled with the crack of shotgun blasts and the screams of soldiers. The shotguns were supposed to penetrate Lucy’s armor, but without a clear view, Ellis wasn’t sure who was winning.
“Let us out!” someone yelled.
This time command didn’t respond.
“Open the hatch!” another soldier screamed.
Whoever was listening in the CIC didn’t reply.
Ellis swallowed. They had locked the men inside Cell 6 with Lucy. Russo and his team weren’t just trapped in there with a monster. They were trapped in a room filling with gas. Even if their breathing apparatus saved them, the gas would make it difficult to see.
A long, guttural screech roared over the channel. At first Ellis wasn’t sure if it was human until a body in black armor slumped to the ground under the video feed. Oval goggles stared up at the feed, eyes frozen behind the visor. Smoke drifted across the room, blanketing the soldier.
Ellis flinched at three more blasts.
“My mask!” shrieked a soldier. He coughed into the comms, his lungs wheezing for air.
Another agonizing scream followed.
This one wasn’t human.
Lucy had been injured.
Ellis strained for a view of the battle as a voice crackled in his helmet. “Dr. Ellis, Dr. Yokoyama, this is Lieutenant Davis. Please confirm your position.”
“We’re still in Lab A,” Ellis replied.
“Good, stay put. I’ve deployed a squad of Marines to your location.”
If Lucy managed to get out of that cell, she would tear through the ship. The only thing standing between her and the crew was a brave squad of men with twelve gauge semi-automatic shotguns.
A thud echoed over the channel. Ellis bit the inside of his lip as another soldier crashed into the wall on screen. He held in a breath as an armored arm reached through the gas. The claws grabbed the man by the neck. A knife-sized bony spik
e popped out of the arm and stabbed the soldier through the center of his mask. Blood pooled around the entry hole. Lucy withdrew the needle and let the soldier slump to the ground as she whirled to face the others. The flash from a shotgun blast hit her in the side, sending her spinning from view.
Coughing, shouting, gunfire, and the shriek of an enraged monster overwhelmed the channel. Ellis wanted to cup his hands over his ears. Even though he knew Marines were outside the lab, he felt trapped like Russo and his men.
“Shoot her in the head! Shoot her in the fucking head!” someone yelled.
There was another blast, followed by what sounded like bullets punching through tendons and bone—an awful, ripping noise that made Ellis shiver.
Yokoyama slowly sat on the stool in front of the monitor. He leaned forward and punched in several commands on the keyboard. It wasn’t until the shattered lens of the camera started turning that Ellis realized what he was doing.
Ellis waited for shotgun blasts that didn’t come.
On screen, the cracked view of the room came into view as the cloud of white dissipated, revealing the outlines of four bodies sprawled on the floor. One of them twitched, but the others lay still.
“Wh-where’s Lucy?” Yokoyama stuttered. “I don’t see her.”
The camera angled toward the hatch, revealing the armored back of a beast standing four feet tall. Circular cracks in Lucy's outer shell seeped blood, and one of her pointy ears was severed.
“What’s she doing?” Yokoyama asked.
“Oh my God,” Ellis whispered. He stared in disbelief as she craned her neck at the camera. Her bulging lips had widened and her pointed chin had split down the middle, opening into four chattering mandibles lined with horned teeth on both sides.
Crack!
Ellis jumped at the shot. The spray from a shotgun took off a chunk of her elbow. Lucy let out a screech and crouched, back hunching as she prepared to strike.
A soldier crawled into view. He aimed his gun and fired again. The second blast cracked her armor just above the navel.
Lucy shrieked and fired her spiked tongue from her open mandibles. The tip broke through the soldier’s right goggle. He convulsed on the ground, legs kicking.
She skittered out of view.
“Where is she?” Ellis said. “Move the camera!”
“I’m trying,” Yokoyama huffed.
As he typed at the keyboard, Lucy suddenly reemerged. She clambered back to the hatch, stood on two feet, and reached for the lock. Her claws rotated to the right as she inserted a key she had taken from one of Russo’s men.
“I don’t believe it,” Yokoyama said.
Ellis nearly choked on the implications. If she could use a key, what else was she capable of?
Lucy’s lips twisted into a grin as the hatch clicked unlocked. Swinging it open, she burst into a passage filled with Marines, and straight into the gunfire of a dozen weapons.
-8-
“There’s been an incident on the Cowpens,” Beckham said. He removed his finger from his earpiece and looked at Kate. Her heart rate had finally returned to a normal pace, but at these words, it spiked it out of control.
“The juvenile Variant tried to escape,” Beckham continued.
“Ellis,” Kate whispered.
Beckham nodded. “He’s fine. Sounds like they were able to stop it before it escaped.”
Normally Kate would have exhaled, but her mind was filled with questions. The first was selfish, but it was also a reminder that she still had a job to do when she got back—had Ellis determined if Kryptonite would work before the juvenile was killed? How many men died to extract the juvenile from New York? If Ellis hadn’t performed all the necessary tests yet, then those men would have died in vain.
Her heart and mind ached from the losses. She could hardly think. It was too much. Stars crept to the edges of her vision. Suddenly lightheaded, she leaned back on Beckham’s chest, trying to listen to his heartbeat beneath the vibration of the Blackhawk.
“ETA five minutes,” the pilot said.
“It’s okay,” Beckham said, leaning down to whisper in her ear. “We’re almost….” He stopped short of finishing, but Kate knew he meant home. Plum Island was gone, and the final hope for humanity rested on a fleet of Navy vessels drifting through the ocean. They were alone, and their resources dwindled every day.
Kate eyed the troop hold. Horn was sitting in the middle of the group, hulking among them like an oversized pro-football player turned babysitter. Most of the kids were crying, or silently in shock. Some cried out for lost parents and siblings, and others asked where they were going.
“Safe,” Horn kept saying. “You’re going somewhere safe.” Jenny and Tasha were tucked up against his chest, his tattooed arms wrapped around both of them. A boy sat cross-legged in front of the girls. He stroked a tattered stuffed animal, head bowed.
Kate carefully pushed herself off Beckham and crawled across the floor to the boy. “What’s your name?” she asked, tapping him on the shoulder.
He slowly lifted his head. His eyes were blue, and his button nose was covered in freckles.
“My name is Javier,” he said. “Do you know where we’re going?”
Kate’s heart froze in her chest. The boy didn’t just share her brother’s name—he was the spitting image of her little brother at that age. Everything that had happened over the past six weeks came crashing down at the sight of the child. Without thinking, she reached forward and embraced Javier in a hug.
“We’re going to a new home. A safe place where there are no monsters.”
As she hugged Javier, she saw the empty seat Meg had occupied an hour earlier. The three Marines who had stood at the open door were gone now too. It was yet another reminder that not everyone was going home.
“There she is, baby!” Harms shouted from the door gun.
Long silhouetted shapes of warships emerged on the horizon. Jets and choppers that looked like toy models were positioned neatly on the flight deck of the GW.
To the east, a Chinook hovered over the Cowpens. A bus-sized shipping container hung from a network of thick ropes attached to the bottom of the chopper, being slowly lowered toward the helipad. As they got closer, Kate read the Biohazard markings on the sides. Despite the warning, the crate didn’t bother her like it might other onlookers. The box contained a weapon that could help bring the end of the war.
Plum Island was destroyed, but the bioreactors that would help eradicate the Variants had been salvaged. She just hoped it would work on the juveniles.
Whimpers all around her reminded her there was another key to winning the war, and it wasn’t a weapon. Children were the future of the world. Innocent and full of life, they would rebuild when this was all over. She understood why Beckham had broken protocol to save these kids, even if it meant putting her and the others at risk.
Javier relaxed in her arms as Kate hugged him close. She remembered holding her little brother years ago, and thought about the word innocence. These kids may have lost any chance of having it themselves, but maybe her own child would have a chance. Kate held Javier closer and hugged him harder.
In a luxury Manhattan apartment, the last thing Meg expected to smell was crap. The putrid smell of sewage was almost worse than the sour, rotting scent of the Variants. Meg wasn’t sure how these people could have lived with it for so long. A flashback to the time she’d spent hiding in her old fire station with Jed and Rex emerged.
She had been forced to make desperate decisions there. Bringing her axe down on her best friend, Eric, was one of them. The thought made her cringe. The crack of his skull was something she would never forget.
Back then, there had been a constant smell of body odor. No matter how many wet wipes she scrubbed her skin with, she couldn’t get the reek off. Anti-bacterial wipes could only do so much to mitigate the stench of rot and piss she had collected when hiding under the corpses in the basement of the fire station.
When her firefi
ghter friends had joked about the apocalypse, they had talked about what would happen, where they would go, what kind of things they would do to survive. No one talked about what happened when toilets stopped flushing and electricity shut off. They certainly didn’t think about what to do if toilet paper ran out. Keeping safe and fed were the two major parts of the conversation, but keeping clean didn’t seem to take priority.
Buckets, towels, and a simple curtain rigged up for privacy were how these people took care of their sanitary needs.
And it smelled awful.
At least it helped keep her mind off Riley. She still couldn’t believe he was gone. She still hadn’t accepted that he was gone. She bowed her head and closed her eyes, overwhelmed with regret and thoughts of what might have been.
“Windows are secure,” Garcia said, cutting across her thoughts. She raised her head to watch him. He rested his M4 against the brick wall and pulled his M9 to check the magazine. Tank was cleaning his SAW on a chair a few feet away. Fitz stood by the windows in silence, his silhouetted frame unmoving.
Huff consoled the people in the center of the room. The group talked in hushed voices from couches, casting skeptical looks toward the new Marines. Meg didn’t blame them; she hadn’t trusted soldiers after Jed had left her to die in the sewers. It wasn’t until Beckham and Team Ghost showed up that she had started to trust the military again.
No, she didn’t blame these people. She had been one of them. But at least now their children were safe. She knew they were grateful for that, even if they didn’t look like it.
Huff held up a hand to silence a heavyset man who was speaking in a raised voice.
“They shot Kirk. Shot him right in his head,” the man growled.
Meg remembered the man with the bloody nose from the rooftop. The bastard had pointed a gun at Beckham. He had been a threat to everyone. The coward had made his choice. Fitz had responded to it with a 7.62 mm round.
Garcia slammed the magazine back into his M9, then put it back in his holster and grabbed his M4. Narrowing his eyes at Huff, he walked toward the group.
The distant screech of a Variant stopped him halfway there. From somewhere overhead came a scratching, followed by a thud, like someone had tripped and fallen on the floor above them.
Extinction End (Extinction Cycle Book 5) Page 10