Salvation (Rise Book 2)

by Nathan Hystad

  “You really believe there’s a place out West?” Yas asked, making her start as the big man had crept up on her.

  “Tom,” Monet said from her other side, also arriving unseen, “our leader, he’s been there.” Yas grunted, as if to convey in equal parts that he trusted Monet but didn’t believe things people hadn’t seen for themselves.

  “How far away are we?” Lina asked Monet. She was so exhausted by the journey that she could concentrate on nothing else. Monet, usually so aware of everything, betrayed her own fatigue as she pulled the tablet from inside her jacket to check.

  “Not far,” she said with mild surprise. “In fac—shit! Everybody down!”

  She hissed the last words and crouched low, hearing the command whispered all the way through their ragged procession.

  “What? What is it?” Lina demanded as she tried to lean over Monet’s shoulder to see the screen.

  “Ahead, five hundred meters,” Monet said as she held up the tablet to show Lina. She saw the colored dots gathering and moving from side to side, and gasped.

  “Why didn’t we hear the warning?” she asked. The tablet was supposed to issue an alarm whenever a Seeker or Tracker roamed close to them.

  “I… I silenced the tablet last night when I was doing something else. I didn’t turn it on again.”

  Lina said nothing, glancing again as the dozen red dots on the display flitted back and forth along an imaginary horizontal line. Monet shoved the tablet to her and stood to shrug off her coat and pack before readying her rifle. She snapped her fingers as she made eye contact with three others, including Yas, and signaled that they should do the same and go with her.

  Lina hadn’t been specifically invited, but she took it upon herself to follow suit. Leaving her coat on the ground with her pack on top, she fished around for the box of spare shells for her shotgun and shoved them into a leg pocket.

  “Everyone else remain out of sight,” she called back to where the others were hidden among the trees. Many more came forward, free of their heavy loads and ready to fight with a variety of weapons. Monet made no attempt to tell them to stay back.

  They set off, soon reaching the edge of the forest. Monet knelt and pulled out the tablet again, this time making a noise of anger and fear as the red dots were joined by two green ones.

  “Trackers and Seekers,” she said, holding up the tablet for those huddled behind her to see.

  “What are they doing?” Yas asked, peering into the distance at the cliff face a hundred meters ahead of them.

  “Trying to find a way in,” Lina said, her finger pointing to the reflection of weak sunlight against the body of a few Seekers as they crowded around something halfway up the sheer rock face.

  Only it wasn’t a flat face at all. Lina could make out the shelf running along it a little above halfway, and when Monet passed her a scope, she could make out the drones trying to find a way inside tunnel entrances. It was a village unlike any she’d ever seen.

  Before Monet could give them orders, either to retreat and abandon the settlers there or to attack and try to save them, a shuddering, rippling sound seemed to suck all of the sound out of the air above them.

  Lina looked up in time to see the shining underbelly of an Overseer vessel block out the sunlight. The ship was nothing like anything she’d seen before and was twice the size of the craft that had bombarded her village.

  “—to get out of here!” a man hissed, clearly casting his vote for escaping.

  “There are people up there,” Lina said quietly.

  “We’re outnumbered,” Yas said to Monet. His tone conveyed a warning, but also a ruthless willingness to fight an uneven battle if that was their fate.

  “We should go back,” another woman offered, “return later and see if there are any survivors.”

  “There are people up there,” Lina said again, louder this time.

  “Listen,” Monet snapped at the woman suggesting they return after the attack. “They have Seekers and Trackers, and a deadly spaceship. You think they’ll leave anyone behind?”

  “There are people up there,” Lina hissed angrily, rounding on all of them and burning an intense gaze through their fear and shaming them into silence.

  Monet broke that silence, sending word for every man, woman, and—she swallowed before she said the word—child with a weapon to come to the front.

  The eyes of the two women who had started the quest alone met again, this time conveying something neither of them could put into words.

  It didn’t mean that either of them wanted to die, but it said that if this was their time, then there was little else they had to do. With only a few hundred fighters to add to the army, their mission was far from a success, and to spend their lives here would make precisely no difference to the greater scheme in play.

  “Screw it,” Monet said out loud as she cradled her rifle and checked her sidearm was still where it should be and loaded.

  Lina sat in the rough, rocky dirt, swaying her upper body gently back and forth. Her hands, somewhat sticky with the drying residue of blood, stained every crease of her palms red.

  She scraped her hands along the rock in front of her, forcing the sharp dust particles into her skin where they stuck to the red. She rubbed her hands in fury, faster and harder with each swipe until she ground them into one another and allowed the shake that started in her feet to move up her body until it filled her chest.

  Fearing the scream would come out, she stood and balled up her jacket before pressing it into her face and exhaling a single, long shout of release and fear into the material.

  The feel of the ground beneath her feet, uneven and treacherous, reminded her as vividly as if it was happening all over again. They’d broke from the cover of the trees to rush the alien ship sitting on the largest patch of flat ground, letting out their collective war cry to find the Overseers, tall and grotesque, visibly startled by their appearance.

  Her body twitched involuntarily as she remembered stumbling on a rock, glancing over to see Buddy galloping along beside her and unable to understand why the coyote would do that. She saw the clear image in her mind of the aliens turning on the spot, seemingly unsure of whether they should run or fight, and when the largest of them descended the ramp from the ship to wave a bony arm the rest seemed to wake up to his command.

  The enemy guns fired; bright bolts of energy searing into their running attack.

  Lina flinched again; her eyes half closed as the screams echoed inside her, but she fought them away. The side she had flinched from was where the man, the brave and angry man, had his own cry of rage cut so suddenly short. She winced at the memory of his body tumbling, threatening to trip her, as his head and arm had been blown away in a flash of singed hair and hot blood. That blood had missed her, the coating on her hands had come later.

  She stood again, pacing relentlessly as more images replayed in her mind.

  Realizing that the handful of aliens firing their weapons had no chance of defeating the hundred or more angry humans running at them, they began to retreat to the ship. The enemy had scrambled up the ramp before any of their leading ranks could reach them.

  The ship kicked up dust as the engines fired, just as a new, louder sound filled the entire canyon. The explosion from the rock face scattered rocks the size of Lina’s head and the strange noises they made as they flew over her was more of a feeling in her mind than a sound; a vibration in the air in place of a scream.

  The explosions, which she realized weren’t the aliens and their drones breaking in, but were the defenders—cornered and desperate—blowing their own defenses and came out to join the fight.

  The villagers ran from their cover, seeing the tide of the fight had turned in their favor. Lina smiled grimly as they rushed across the valley, a stream of capable Freeborns of all ages flooding the ground.

  They chose to die fighting, and the decision of Lina and their people to attack made both suicidal charges successful.


  Part of a Tracker drone landed ahead of them and the running assault parted like water around a rock in a river. She had seen past it at the flying ship, where two trios of aliens ran towards their one hope of escape, only to falter when they saw that another attack was coming from the trees.

  The cowards had decided to save themselves and sacrifice the six of their kind for a chance of survival and gunned down the approaching rush with no regard for their own kind. The big cannons on the vessel blew the aliens apart just as easily as it did the humans.

  Others around her were yelling and whooping as they charged, and the ship couldn’t turn in time to use their big guns because her people were already at the ramp and throwing themselves on board.

  Flashes. She remembered flashes inside the dark interior and only now could her brain connect the dots and tell her that they were gunshots, which shredded the aliens trying to escape.

  She dropped her jacket, her hands opening and closing as she recalled the heavy snapping sound. She didn’t see the impact, but the young woman ahead of her spun wildly and fell. She rolled, her limbs flailing as if she could no longer control them, and Lina dropped to her knees in front of her as she skidded to a stop.

  Her face was cut, and her hands clutched at her stomach where her fingernails tore at the material. Her throat convulsed, and Lina pulled her hands away, lifting her clothing to see blood on the woman’s bronzed skin. She’d wiped it off, horrified as the black hole flooded with more hot, red blood.

  Lina had pushed hard on the wound, yelling for help but not hearing her own words over the cacophony. She held the woman, keeping pressure on the laceration until the woman gagged, convulsing harder as it dawned on Lina that the bullet had drilled through her body.

  The girl died in her arms, and the look on her face would stay with Lina for eternity.

  The Tracker that had shot the girl was driven to the dirt by gunfire before a man swung an axe savagely overhead to half crush the artificial skull of the dog-shaped drone.

  She’d stood up after seeing that, suddenly no longer afraid or out of breath. She walked forward with her shotgun raised into her shoulder, reaching the ramp of the ship in time to see an alien fall on the ramp and scramble to its feet on hideously long bird-like legs.

  It was focusing all its attention inside, and Lina pulled the trigger. She felt little happiness as the alien glanced to the mortal gunshot holes in its guts. She walked closer, pulling the trigger again, this time a head shot.

  The valley grew silent with the exception of the ship’s roaring engines. No more alien energy blasts, no more echoing shotgun claps. The aliens were dead. They’d won. She heard footsteps behind her but lacked the energy to crane her neck and see who it was.

  “You okay?” Monet asked in a voice cracking with exhaustion.

  “Yeah,” Lina answered. “I guess.”

  “You… you did well. You did the right thing. We did the right thing by…”

  “Yeah,” Lina said again as she dragged herself up to stand in front of the fierce woman who, it seemed, had a soft side after all. Monet stepped forwards, wrapping up the younger woman in a hug that showed not only her superior height but her hidden tenderness too.

  “Hey,” she whispered in Lina’s ear, her words edged with excitement. “Want to learn how to fly a spaceship?”

  Chapter 29

  Dex

  Welcome to Alexandria. The sign was long past, but the words echoed in Dex’s mind. He was close. The tablet sat on his lap, the glow of the screen bright against the bottom of his chin as he steered off the freeway and over the offramp. He’d never been here before. He’d run through Washington on occasion, but not often, and rarely enjoyed spending time there.

  Out of curiosity, the first time he’d visited, he’d driven by the White House’s former location and the monument. Both were nothing but craters in the earth. Much of the city was like that, making it hard to drive around in, but some had been rebuilt by slave workers over the years. Now it was almost a passable city, with many of the higher up humans living there.

  The fact that there was an Overseer shipyard made sense to Dex. From here, they could use their monstrosities to travel the sub-orbital flights overseas, and it put them close to the freight haulers that continued to run between China, Europe, and America.

  The sunlight was waning, little more than a distant memory as it moved beyond the horizon, and soon Dex was relying on the truck’s headlights and the sliver of the moon that poked through the light cloud cover.

  He missed his car more than he wanted to admit. It was like he’d needed to leave it behind as part of his old life; the part where he hunted humans for aliens, putting him on the wrong side of the war. That Dex was dead; buried in the forests around Cripple Creek. The new version was even more deadly. Kathy would attest to that. He grimaced as he recalled her body hitting the copse floor, blood spilling from her head wound.

  “She’s gone. Deal with it, Dexter Lambert,” he said out loud. It was the first real sound he’d heard in hours. Another thing he missed were the classic rock CDs. He pressed the dull silver knob in the center of the dash and was rewarded with nothing but static as he spun the dial from end to end. He shut it off, preferring silence to the white noise.

  The end was near. He rolled down the window with the old hand cranks, feeling the damp air. It was still summer, but something had changed. It felt like early fall, and Dex left the window open as tiny raindrops peppered his arm.

  The trip had been slow, Dex being stopped by the occupation twice on the road. They’d grilled him each time, scanning him to confirm that he was indeed a Hunter. That was new. It meant there were new orders, probably coming from the Colonel, but likely passed on to him from the top. The smug alien bastards were getting too cocky. Once their gate was open, there would be no more wasting their time with the puny humans.

  Dex’s gaze shifted to his coffee cup, empty hours ago, and he wished he had more. His eyelids were closing, his mood as sharp as a knife’s edge. He drove through the commuter streets, heading for the residential neighborhood along the river’s brink. Carlton Nesman was the objective on his tablet, the name he’d show at the shipyard hangar, but it was irrelevant. The old man was likely already dead; another lost life because of the leather-scented invaders.

  By the time he arrived in Old Town he was seething with anger. Tom believed they had a shot at this. Dex wasn’t as confident. He was certain there were important details on that datastick from Nebraska, but the Reclaimers leader hadn’t shared much of the detail with him. All Dex could do was stick to the plan. That began with getting cleared by the inquisition, and he’d done that. The next was being issued a job along the East Coast, which he’d accomplished. Now he needed to gather the munitions from the townhouse along Cameron Street.

  He flicked his lights off, wishing the truck made less racket. Anyone would have been able to hear it from two blocks away. He parked three blocks from his destination to be sure, and as soon as the engine rumbled off, Dex thought he’d gone deaf.

  There was an absence of noise as he climbed out of the truck. No horns, no city sounds, not even the gentle cooing from a pigeon’s nest. This worried him, and he grabbed the gun borrowed from Cleveland, leaning it against the outside of the truck. He pulled out the Beretta he’d taken from Kathy’s room and stuck it into a holster around his chest, nestled inside his leather jacket.

  He shoved the truck’s keys into his pocket and shut the door as quietly as he could before jogging to the sidewalk. He stayed in the shadows, hugging close to the brick buildings, pausing under an old restaurant’s weathered awning before continuing. His nerves were on fire and he couldn’t quite put his finger on why. This should be cut and dry, but his intuition was screaming at him.

  Dex located the destination ahead. It was obviously an old fire hall, converted into lofts, and Dex figured the building would stand the test of time, as long as no one nuked the hell out of it from above. He glanced to either side
of the street, and when he observed nothing, he crossed, his boots kicking up a few rocks along the way.

  The front door would be locked and sealed tight, so Dex lifted an alley gate’s cast-iron latch, swinging it inwardly. The hinges protested and he cringed at the sound. No one’s here, Dex. Take a chill pill.

  The rear of the building was exactly as it had been described. The door was tall, eight feet high, and the real lock was hidden in a panel behind a false wall of brick a foot to the handle’s right side. Dex fiddled with the panel, and it popped open to reveal the keypad.

  Dex had the numbers memorized. Tom had made sure of it before he’d let him go. He keyed in the four number sequence, and the door handle clicked. Dex tugged it, and he was in.

  He tried to pull it shut behind him, but something stopped the door. It was being ripped open, the handle flying from his grip. Dex swung his gun up, but was too late. The rifle was knocked from his hands by a huge paw.

  “What the hell are you doing, Lambert?” Tubs asked.

  The man was huge, even bigger than before. Dex had last seen him outside of Detroit while they were both chasing the targets he later understood to be Monet and Alec. That had been a close call, and now Dex felt the noose tighten around his throat.

  Dex stepped backwards, farther into the Reclaimers’ base.

  “Stop!” Tubs shouted. He was on Dex in a flash, pressing the man against the wall. The air burst from Dex’s lungs in a rush.

  He fought for air, and Tubs loosened his grip. “I asked you a question, Dex!”

  “What! I’m on a job, and you’re messing it up,” Dex said, coughing in between words.

  “I don’t buy it.” Tubs was heavily muscled and bald, and his moustache had thickened out, making him appear even more imposing if that was possible.

  “What do you want, Tubs?” Dex lifted his hands in front of him. This brute was going to ruin everything. He couldn’t let the man stop him. They needed to disable part of the Overseers’ fleet if they were to stand a chance. Suddenly, Dex realized the immense pressure of the task Tom had given him.