The winged abomination dived at them, wings buffeting Piero. He fell on his ass and scooted backward, staring up in awe.
“Help!” Antonio yelled as he resurfaced.
Pushing himself to his feet, Piero shouldered his wet rifle and scanned the water for a target. Antonio was already gone, pulled under the surface again.
Piero paced at the edge of the river, eyes flitting from the sky to the water. The winged juvenile had vanished in the darkness, but he could still hear the sound of its wings.
“Piero!” Antonio screamed. He had reemerged again ten feet to the right, gasping for air. “Help me!”
Before Piero had covered half the distance to his friend, the abomination from the sky swooped down and grabbed Antonio’s head with a pair of talon-tipped feet. It yanked him from the water, away from the grasp of its hungry brothers and sisters.
The pale, armored body of a seven-foot-long juvenile shot out of the water, reaching for Antonio’s feet. It grabbed his right leg and pulled even as the winged juvenile rose into the air.
Piero watched in horror as the two juveniles pulled in opposite directions. Antonio screamed in agony. There was only one thing he could do now. A moment before Antonio was ripped in half, Piero put a bullet in his brother’s brain.
Antonio had always said he intended to die with a smile on his face. He wasn’t smiling now, his expression a bloody mask of horror. Half his body was pulled into the sky while the other half was yanked under the water.
Sickened, Piero stepped back, tripped over an abandoned bicycle, and dropped his rifle. He tried to feel something, but there was only numbness. He gasped for air and tried to make himself move, realizing that he would be next if he didn’t. The open maintenance door was only a short jog away. He darted through and locked it behind him. Placing his back against the rusted metal, he closed his eyes, trying desperately to breathe, to block out what had just happened.
What he had just done.
No, he thought. This can’t be happening.
Darkness shrouded him, close and suffocating. There was water in his lungs still. He tried not to cough, but he couldn’t hold back. He choked, bent over, and spat water onto the ground. Gagging, he threw up what little food had been in his stomach.
He wiped his mouth with one hand and reached up for his NVGs with the other. His fingers scraped against his helmet. The goggles were gone, lost in the Tiber. At least his rifle had NVG optics.
Piero cursed under his breath.
In the chaos, he had forgotten the rifle outside.
Alone, unarmed, and in complete darkness, Sergeant Piero Angaran shuffled down the tunnel. He held up his hands and felt for the damp wall to guide him. A second later, something hit the metal door behind him.
He ran then, ran with his eyes closed and hands out in front of him, not caring if he fell. The door rattled, then was hit by another thud that broke it off its hinges. Moonlight flowed into the maintenance passage, and silhouetted in the eerie light was the form of a great winged beast.
-1-
A summer breeze rustled Master Sergeant Joe Fitzpatrick’s shaggy red hair as he crossed the deck of the USS Iwo Jima. The Wasp-class amphibious assault ship cut through the rough waters of the English Channel, paving the way for the USS Mesa Verde and the USS Ashland. Together, the three amphibious vessels made up what was left of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit. The Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer, the USS Forrest Sherman, was hours away from joining the MEU.
Fitz touched the handle of the hatchet he kept in a sheath on his duty belt. It wasn’t regulation, but he kept it to honor the bravest woman he’d ever known. All the losses over the past seven months had weighed heavily on him during the lonely ocean journey, making for long days and restless nights. Without Captain Reed Beckham and Master Sergeant Parker Horn by his side, he felt more alone than he had in a very long time.
He thought about the friends and brothers he’d never see again: Sergeant Jose Garcia, Staff Sergeant Jay Chow, Staff Sergeant Alex Riley, Lieutenant Colonel Ray Jensen, and so many others. But the one he missed most was Meg Pratt. She had been like the sister he’d never had.
Stroking the handle of her favorite weapon helped ease some of the loss. Part of her still remained with him, even if it was just wood and steel.
He approached the warning line on the edge of the deck and peered up at a red sunset that looked like a gunshot. He smoothed down his uniform, fresh from a supply locker on the Iwo. His hair whipped in a gust of wind. It was far too long. His black carbon blades and black fatigues weren’t regulation either, but he no longer had a commanding officer breathing down his neck about little things like polished boots or facial hair.
Now that Fitz was the new non-commissioned officer in charge of Team Ghost, he operated mostly independently of the other soldiers. He reached down to scratch his second-in-command behind the ears. Apollo sniffed at the salty breeze, his ears perked as if ready and waiting for orders.
Those orders would have to wait.
They were still an hour away from making landfall in France. Over seventy years ago, the Allied Forces had stormed the beaches of Normandy during Operation Overlord to take back the country from the Nazis. Now Fitz and his team were about to repeat history to take France back from the Variants.
Fitz was ready to do that legacy proud. More than ready. After a nearly three-month hiatus, the 24th MEU was going to join the fight for Europe. President Jan Ringgold and Vice President George Johnson had answered the call from the new European Unified Forces, only to have their help delayed due to bureaucratic red tape and military commanders who decided not to follow orders. They had insisted that the United States Armed Forces needed to prioritize their own country’s safety. Their argument sounded a lot like what Colonel Zach Wood had said before Fitz blew his head off.
America wasn’t safe by any means, but rebuilding was underway. The Variants had been almost completely wiped out, and the juveniles were on the run. But the rest of the world wasn’t so lucky. Rumors of new types of Variants were popping up all over—creatures with monstrous mutations.
Team Ghost had spent nearly two months with the 24th MEU, helping with recovery efforts along the eastern seaboard of the United States. The next three weeks were spent clearing the Pacific of derelict ships and raiding Navy destroyers whose crews, infected with the Hemorrhage Virus, had managed to escape the deployment of the bioweapons designed to bring them down. Fitz had lost several new friends on those missions. He had no doubt he would lose more in France.
Like they had so many times before, the Marines were prepared to fight evil wherever it emerged. Only this time, the Marines were fighting at a fraction of their original forces. Only five percent of the Marine Corps was left. The 24th MEU consisted of around two thousand men and women. Many of them were volunteers that Vice President Johnson had requested to help rebuild the shattered ranks of the American military. Hundreds of the new faces were already gathered on the deck, helping load M1A1 Abrams Tanks, LAV-25s, Humvees, Assault Breacher Vehicles, MTVR heavy trucks, and Fitz’s new ride, an all-terrain version of the heavily armed MRAP vehicle, the MATV, that took a crew of six plus an additional twelve in the back.
The pre-combat sounds sent a phantom chill up the legs Fitz didn’t have, and adrenaline emptied into his bloodstream. He spat over the railing.
A full moon rose over the bloody horizon. For a split second he saw the silhouette of what looked like a dragon moving across the moon. He had seen a lot of monsters, but he knew that was impossible. Regardless, he still reached up, rubbed at his eyes, and focused on the moon. The silhouette was gone.
He turned to check on the Mesa Verde and the Ashland, still trailing the Iwo Jima. Final mission briefings were underway on the decks of the other ships. Armament specialists were carefully loading weapons systems while pilots checked their instruments. Everyone had a duty.
A trio of Black Hawks passed overhead. The choppers soared toward the rising moon, buzzing away like
bugs toward a floodlight. He pushed his earpiece in and listened to the radio chatter. It was difficult to hear over the clank of machinery and raised voices of combat troops on the deck behind him, but he could vaguely make out the transmissions.
“Command, Rogue 1 . . . Echo 4 and Echo 5 report Variants on the shore. Adults in the vicinity.”
“Come again, Rogue 1. Didn’t get your last. Confirm…adults? EUF said the area was clear.”
“Copy that, Command. You heard right. EUF must have been wrong. Echo 4 and Echo 5 confirm Variants on the ground. We got ourselves an adult problem.”
A hand on Fitz’s arm startled him. Sergeant Jeni Rico flicked a pink-tipped lock of hair from her face and smiled, dimples deepening in her cheeks.
“Fitzie, you hear that shit?” she asked. “Sounds like the French didn’t do a very good job of bug spraying. Kryptonite must not have been deployed everywhere.”
Fitz sighed and bent down again to stroke Apollo’s soft fur, catching a glimpse of the brace still on Rico’s injured leg. She was lucky she wasn’t in a cast.
Apollo whined, amber eyes searching Fitz’s face. He knew something was up with all the activity on the deck.
“It’s okay, boy,” Fitz reassured him. He stroked the dog’s head gently. Fitz guessed it wasn’t fear making the dog uneasy. He probably missed Beckham and Kate. Fitz had promised them the 24th MEU wouldn’t be gone this long, and Beckham had reluctantly allowed Apollo to come to keep Fitz safe.
That had been three months ago.
Fitz sighed and stood. He missed his friends too, and being so far away from Plum Island made him feel anxious. How could he protect them if he wasn’t there?
“You’re not going to say anything about my new hair color?” Rico asked.
Fitz shook his head like he hadn’t noticed. “Is it different?”
She twisted a pink strand. “It’s not blue anymore.”
He examined her from the corner of his eye. She was cute, smart, and fun, but he’d only ever had time for one relationship—the Marine Corps. Rico might have been flirting, but Fitz wouldn’t know how to flirt back if he tried.
Rico changed the subject with a frustrated huff. “How fucking hard is it to replicate Kate’s bug killer?” She chewed her gum furiously as she spoke, one hand on her hip. “I mean, all they had to do was launch that shit into the air and sit back in lawn chairs and watch.”
Fitz managed a nod. He wasn’t sure exactly what to expect in France. No one was. The EUF had finally taken a section of Paris back, but intel was hard to come by. General Vaughn Nixon, the man in charge of the invasion, had planned Operation Beachhead without much to go on. Not long after the final briefing, Colonel Roger Bradley, the commander of the 24th MEU, had pulled Fitz and the other leaders into a meeting and dropped a bombshell. Fitz still hadn’t figured out a way to tell Team Ghost.
“Fitzie, you listenin’ to me?”
“I told you not to call me that,” Fitz snapped.
Rico stopped chewing and glanced down at the deck.
“I’m sorry. I’m just sick of waiting to get off this damn ship. Clearing derelict vessels and performing recovery operations is boring as hell,” Fitz said.
A pair of Ospreys took off and climbed into the sky, engines zooming louder than a fleet of riding lawnmowers.
“You’ll get to fight soon enough,” Rico said. She pulled the strap of her sawed off shotgun tighter around her shoulder.
More Black Hawks joined the Ospreys on the horizon.
“Shit, we really got an adult problem, don’t we?” Rico muttered.
“It’s not the adults I’m worried about. It’s their offspring. They’ve had longer to evolve over here. And the Variant adults have had time to breed longer, too.”
He eyed the vehicle assigned to his squad. The two-inch tan armor of the MATV was designed to protect the occupants from IEDs, but he wasn’t sure how it would hold up against the juvenile toxins.
Rico scowled. “I hope Commander Davis is having better luck back in the States.”
Fitz raised his brows, thinking of the woman who had helped take back the USS George Washington from the deranged officer who’d attempted a mutiny. Lieutenant Colonel Marsha Kramer had been convinced that a nuclear solution was their only option to defeat the Variants. If it weren’t for Davis, Fitz would have been nothing more than a pile of ash on the concrete in D.C. The commander had caught a couple of bullets in the process, but from what he had heard, Davis was already back in action on the GW.
“I’m sure she’s doing just fine,” Fitz said. He forced his gaze away from the horizon and jerked his chin toward their ride. “Let’s round up the new team, shall we?”
Rico nodded and blew a bubble. They crossed the deck together and put their gear down next to the MATV. Staff Sergeant Blake Tanaka, Specialist Yas Dohi, and Sergeant Hugh Stevenson were already loading the troop hold at the back of the truck.
“Gentlemen,” Fitz said as he approached.
All three men spun around and fell into a line. Fitz scrutinized them each in turn, just like Beckham had taught him to do. He started with Tanaka, who was fumbling with an iPod. The soldier hailed from New York and had a hint of a Brooklyn accent. A head shorter than everyone else, Tanaka made up for his lack of height with the build of an Olympic wrestler. He was in his early thirties, about the same age as Fitz.
“Those better not get in the way” Fitz said when he saw the long blade of a Katana, as well as its short-bladed companion Wakizashi, strapped to Tanaka’s back.
“These have been in my family for generations. My grandfather killed with these blades during WWII, and my family would be honored if I kill Variants with them during WWIII. I understand they’re not regulation, sir, but neither is that.” Tanaka’s eyes dropped to Fitz’s hatchet.
Fitz shrugged. “Hey, if you can kill Variants with them, by all means, bring them. But you use your primary weapon unless we’re down to hand-to-hand combat. Got it?”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“Use them toothpicks against an armored juvenile?” Stevenson laughed. “Good luck with that.”
“What did you say?” Tanaka pulled his earbuds out of his iPod, the music so loud that Fitz caught a drip of a Lil’ Troy song he hadn’t heard for years. “You want to try and clean your teeth with one of these?”
Stevenson glared at the smaller man. The music continued to blare from Tanaka’s earbuds and he pulled off a glove to shut off the device.
“Why do you listen to that crap?” Stevenson asked. He shook his head and folded his muscular arms across his chest.
“Crap? This shit is gold!” Tanaka straightened his back. “What the hell is your problem, man?”
“Cut the horseshit,” Fitz said. He stepped between the two men—his first opportunity to lead, and an important one, considering they were preparing for battle.
“Sorry, sir,” Tanaka said.
Stevenson came to parade rest when Fitz shot him a glare. The youngest member of the new team had grown up in Texas and played college football, like Big Horn. Stevenson wasn’t quite as big, but his chest muscles bulged under the black armored pads he had added to his gear. He had spent most of the voyage to Europe doing yoga and reading the comic books he had dragged half way across the world.
To Stevenson’s right was the oldest member of Team Ghost: forty-five-year-old Specialist Yas Dohi, which he’d told Fitz meant “rock” in Navajo. He was a quiet man, with dark black hair and a silver goatee, but Fitz got the feeling that he’d seen a lot in his time. His sharp brown eyes didn’t miss much, and he was the best poker player Fitz had ever met.
He scanned his team a final time, just like Beckham had always done, to see if they were frosty. All three men were transfers from other Special Forces units. Stevenson was a machine gunner from a Marine Recon Unit, while Tanaka and Dohi were both Navy SEALs specializing in tracking, recon, and amphibious insertion. Their service ranks had transferred with them when they were assigned to Te
am Ghost.
It was slightly unorthodox to mix SEALs and Marines, but with the military still in disarray it wasn’t unusual to have a new fire-team consist of soldiers from different branches. It also wasn’t unusual for soldiers to carry custom weapons like swords or the hatchet hanging from Fitz’s belt. He had even seen a guy carrying a baseball bat on a mission to take back a container ship.
Up ahead, a jagged coastline emerged, silhouetted in the moonlight. Mist drifted across the water, and Fitz remembered the steamy heads of Variants cresting the ocean back at Plum Island when he was in his old guard tower. The sight emptied another rush of adrenaline into his system. He shivered in the cool night air, wondering if this was how his grandfather had felt before he had stormed the beaches with tens of thousands of other men to take it back from the Nazis.
“Listen up,” Fitz said. “First off, you all need to stop calling me ‘sir.’ Fitz, Fitzpatrick, or even ‘brother’ works.”
His team nodded back and he continued. “Operation Beachhead starts in a few hours. We hit the beaches after the tanks clear a path. Then we work our way inland to help build the FOB. We make contact with the EUF and wait for orders. Any questions?”
Rico raised her hand. “Fitzie…?”
Fitz glared at her, watching her dimples fold into a frown. Sometimes she reminded him a lot of Riley. Her humor was usually welcome, but she still had to learn when to joke and when to be serious.
“I mean, Fitz, sorry,” Rico said. “Where is the EUF?”
“Yeah,” Stevenson added, putting his hand over his eyes like a visor as he looked at the cliffs. “I don’t see any white uniforms out there.”
This was the moment he’d been dreading. Fitz took a deep breath and said, “They aren’t coming.”
Every member of Team Ghost focused on him.
“What?” Stevenson asked, his mouth hanging open.
“Colonel Bradley briefed us an hour ago and said the EUF can’t risk sending us any forces. They were assaulted last night by an army of juveniles and are hunkered down in Paris. They are barely hanging on to their base. They are surrounded in all directions and it’s our job to clear a path to them.”
The Extinction Cycle (Book 6): Extinction Aftermath Page 2