by Weston Ochse
I eased my way around the corner and into the dispensary as they removed his body armor.
“Name, rank and affiliation,” Ohirra barked.
He was little more than a tall, rail thin kid. Had it been pre-invasion he’d be a star center for a high school basketball team somewhere. His dark hair was little more than a buzz cut. He wore Kevlar skivvies similar to ours, but instead of toe shoes, he wore some sort of metallic sock. His eyes were wide with worry.
“Name, rank, and affiliation,” she repeated.
“Ss-Sam Sykes,” he stuttered. “Lance Corporal, Armored Cavalry for N—New United States of North Am—American Armed Forces.”
“That’s a mouthful,” Stranz said.
“You can say that again,” Pearl said.
“That’s a mouthful.”
“How many more of you are there?” Ohirra asked.
“We have one four person squad and a platoon of raptors,” he said, gaining enough confidence not to stutter.
“Those the mechanical canines?” Stranz asked.
“We call them raptors.”
“Of course you do,” Olivares said. He turned to Pearl, who was shielding her brother. “Hey, Wonder Twins. Go out and bring Mason inside. We don’t need him wandering off anywhere. No telling what sort of trouble he’d find.”
While they came and got me, Ohirra asked, “Where are reinforcements?”
The boy shook his head. “I don’t know. Lieutenant Stanford was in charge of that.”
“How would you communicate?” she asked.
“Don’t know, that was Lieutenant—”
“Stanford.” She licked her lips. “You mentioned that there were four persons in your squad. Who’s the other one?”
He stared at the floor and was either unwilling or unable to answer.
“Who is the other member of your squad?” she repeated, nails in her voice.
But the kid continued to stare at the same spot on the floor. Then Stranz entered into it. He made eye contact with the young sergeant and got up close. It was laughable, actually. The kid was already tall enough to start on an NBA basketball team, and Stranz looked like a five year old talking to an adult. Still, the young man was unwavering in his courage, the complete opposite of Earl.
“Listen,” Stranz said conspiratorially. “You really should answer. Last guy who pissed her off isn’t with us anymore.”
The kid flicked a look at Ohirra much like a dog might an onrushing car.
“She’s a karate master, brother. Seven finger death punch and all that shit.” Stranz knocked on the kid’s sallow chest. “I kid you not. Her shit is real.”
Sykes’s eyes were wild.
Ohirra cleared her throat.
“Saxton,” the kid said hurriedly. “Nick Saxton. He’s out there waiting for our signal.”
“What’s the signal?” Stranz asked, now taking the lead.
“I don’t know.”
Stranz put his hands on his hips and shook his head. “Well, shit, Lance Corporal Sykes. You’re just a huge fucking disappointment. There’s a whole lot you don’t know. Why should I even believe you? After all, you held out on us before.”
“No really.” Sykes’ voice cracked. “I just don’t want to be here.”
“Shit, son. None of us want to be here.” Stranz turned so that only we could see his face and beamed one of the biggest shit-eating grins I’ve seen in recent memory, then got serious again and turned back to Sykes. “Listen, you play your cards right and we’ll treat you with respect. Now, how can we get in contact with Saxton?”
“He’s on emergency channel two in my suit. I swear, that’s all I know. We came here last minute. We didn’t even bring rations.” Then he nodded to the super EXO Chance and Olivares had killed. “And then he started to...”
“What?” Stranz asked.
Sykes clammed up.
“What did he do? Where is the staff?” He looked around. “Are there other people here?”
Sykes’s eyes went wide again.
“What did you do?” Stranz asked, all serious, all mean.
Sykes actually started to cry. “I didn’t do anything, I swear.” He pointed to a door and sobbed, “They’re in there.”
Sykes looked at me. I nodded.
“Why don’t you go and see what happened?”
Stranz had Merlin join him and both headed for the door. Meanwhile, Liebl and Olivares were clearing away both sentry guns and tossing them onto the body of the other super EXO. They righted an examining table. I slowly shrugged out of my EXO, every movement a jail house shank. As soon as I unclipped the front, blood poured out from where it had pooled.
Stranz and Merlin led a man and a woman in lab coats from the closet where they’d been held. The man, the doctor I presumed from the stethoscope around his neck, was in his fifties or sixties, bald, and a little overweight. His face was covered with bruises to the point where his right eye was almost entirely closed and his lips were puffed and bloody. The woman was in worse shape. Her head was down and her hair covered most of her face, but I could still see that it had been battered. She wore a lab coat as well, but hers was pulled about her shoulders like a shawl. It hung long enough to cover her naked torso and bottom, but not long enough to conceal purple bruises and smears of dried blood along the inside of her legs.
Upon seeing this, Olivares stormed over and threw the kid against the wall, pinning him there with an EXO fist around the neck. “What the fuck did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“The hell you didn’t,” Olivares growled. “Look at her.”
“I—I tried to—” He gagged as Olivares began to close his fist.
“The kid is telling the truth,” the doctor said. He pointed to the dead man in the other super EXO. “It was that one.”
Olivares released the boy, who fell like an empty sack to the ground, wheezing as he struggled to breathe.
“Help her,” I said to Merlin.
He went to the woman, who jerked when he touched her arm. He tried to guide her to the side, but she began to shake. Urine flowed down one leg. Merlin gave me a pained look.
“Hold on a minute, sugar.” Chance began to remove her EXO. Within a moment, she was standing wearing nothing other than toe shoes and EXO skivvies. Her skin was caramel-colored. Her features were chiseled from what must have been thousands of hours in the gym. Her face was comely, even with close-cropped hair.
She trod lightly over the urine and placed both of her hands on the woman’s upper arms, guiding her to the table. All the while Chance spoke in low soothing tones.
I was about to say something when darkness closed in and owned me.
WHEN NEXT I awoke, I was on the table and the doctor was talking to someone I couldn’t see. He had tears in his eyes as he worked on me.
“... wanted to know where the aliens were. We couldn’t tell them, of course. So he beat me first, then Nancy. I think he enjoyed raping her, even though it was meant to get me talking. She’d made me promise no matter what, not to tell him anything. She didn’t want to be the reason to ruin the mission.”
“‘No matter what’,” Chance repeated. “Rape definitely fell into that category.”
“It took every ounce of will not to tell them.”
“Doesn’t matter if you had,” Chance said. “He still would have finished. Makes me happy it was me who killed him.” She stepped into my view so I could actually see her. “What was his name?” she asked.
“He called himself Picket.” The doctor did something more then asked, “Why do you want to know?”
“I collect the names of those I hate.” she said, her slash of a smile holding enough malice it could have been the twin to Olivares’s.
I cleared my throat and managed to say, “Doctor?”
“Ah, the patient lives. Good.” He nodded. “It means I’m doing my job well.”
I noticed that a bag of blood was attached to my right arm.
“What�
�s the score?” I asked.
“Twenty to nothing,” he said. “Bases loaded and up comes Babe Ruth.”
I grinned. I liked this guy.
“Looks like you nicked your spleen. Got that stapled and just closing you up now.”
I noticed I didn’t feel any pain. I also realized I felt strong... stronger than I should. “What’d you give me?”
“Local anesthetic so I could do what I needed to and a little blood.”
“What’s in the blood? Turbo fuel?”
“Something like that. It was harvested from one of our alien specimens and stored in our deep freeze.”
“You put alien blood in me?”
He nodded but still concentrated on my side. “Indeed. They have the same DNA and this one was O Neg, so it’s universal. This wound will probably heal in a matter of hours as well. Their blood has some type of nanites that do miraculous things. Their ability to clot is nothing short of incredible.” He finally looked up. “All done. Now, I’m told it’s you we have to thank for the rescue.”
“Well, to tell the truth, we didn’t come specifically to rescue you. It was just a byproduct of our mission.”
“So you came to get the aliens, too,” the doctor said.
“We’re going to turn them over to their kind,” I said. “They’ve asked for them. How’s Nancy?”
His face grew serious. “Sedated. This was bad for her.”
“Does she have any family?”
The doctor hesitated, then with his eyes lowered, he said, “She’s my daughter.”
“Oh.” What was there to say? To watch your daughter get raped and do nothing had to have been the hardest thing he’d ever done. “Listen, doctor, is there anyone around here who can help? I’d take you all with us, but we’ll be moving into a place that would make a hornet’s nest look luxurious.”
“We’ll be fine. I’ve been on this mission since I got my medical license. Nancy is the same. We don’t know anything else.”
“So you stayed?”
He shrugged. “It’s the mission. We considered the safekeeping of the specimens to be the most important job on the planet.”
“As it turns out, it probably was.” I felt constricted. I wanted to move. “Can I get up?”
“Once you take this in, yes,” he said, gesturing at the bag of blood. Then he added, “And thank you, Lieutenant Mason.”
I shook my head as I peered over to where Nancy lay on another righted examining table. “No thanks needed. The one thing we can’t afford to lose is our humanity. There’s a tenuous thread that connects everyone together that can’t, or in this case, shouldn’t be broken. Some people decide to take advantage of situations. Some people try and survive them. I wish you and your daughter the best of luck.”
Stranz came over and stood by me. The doctor finished up and left us alone. “How’re you doing, sir?”
“Did you really say that Ohirra knew the seven finger death punch?”
His frown turned into a grin. “You heard me?”
“Yeah, I heard. You did good, Stranz. Real good.”
He blushed, then said, “We found the entrance to the underground complex.”
“Can you get it open?” I asked.
“Given enough time, we could figure out a way to break it.”
“How long would that take,” I asked.
“A day? A week? Who knows?”
I turned to the doctor and stared.
He nodded without looking up. “I’ll give you the combination. It’ll be easier that way.”
“I think so. Now why don’t you go and take care of your daughter? We’ve got everything covered from here out.”
He was halfway across the room when the earthquake hit.
Everyone in an EXO was able to stay on their feet, but those without one were hurled to the ground like dolls. I didn’t even try to stand, instead turtling to protect myself from falling objects. Cabinets snapped open, emptying their contents onto the floor. Glass bottles and beakers shattered. Items on the counters bounced and twisted as the surface bucked. When the quake finally stopped, I realized it had only lasted ten seconds.
I made my way unsteadily to my feet.
Olivares and Chance were helping the doctor and his daughter up as Stranz righted an overturned table.
The place was a disaster.
Merlin began to pick things from the floor and place them back on the counters. He still needed his father’s lance for balance.
“You know what that was, right?” Ohirra said to me.
“Fort Irwin?”
“My best guess,” she said.
“But that’s over five hundred miles away. How could we feel it here?”
She joined Merlin in putting things back the way they were. “If the meteorite was seventy-five meters it would deliver the equivalent of a hundred megatons worth of TNT. Such an impact would obliterate an area the size of Paris or Washington D.C. Each of them are roughly fifty square miles in size. What we felt here was merely a tickle compared to what happened at ground zero. My guess is it was a lot bigger than that, too.”
I thought of all the men and women we had to leave behind. I thought of the refugees. I thought of Thompson. A lump formed in my throat as I realized that the ’Crealiac were raining these rocks all over the world. It wasn’t just those at Fort Irwin, it was everywhere. To have that sort of power and to use it to hurl meteors at our planet made us seem so insignificant. Was there really any chance for us?
Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.
Samuel Johnson
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE DOCTOR’S LAST name was Wilson but he said to call him Doctor Paul. Once we helped him and his daughter bring the dispensary into some semblance of order, he gave us the combination then told us that what we were looking for was on level seven. He said the other levels were abandoned, but we were free to look if we liked. Not that I wouldn’t have wanted to, but we’d been at this location for too long already as it was. I was eager to get back on mission.
I ordered Olivares and Chance to join me. Once inside, we noted that the power had been turned off. Liebl and Earl were outside covering down, so I sent Stranz to find a way to turn the lights back on, which left Ohirra, Merlin and Pearl inside the dispensary; they were busy repairing my suit as best they could. Charlemagne’s shoulder had been dislocated, but was now back in socket. I’d ordered him to take it easy, but I doubted he would. I led using the floodlights from the EXOs to illuminate the way. We bypassed the other levels, and on level seven a single door welcomed us at the bottom of the wide metal stairs. The door was locked from the outside.
It was an easy trick for Olivares to snap the lock off with his EXO fist. We opened the door to find a rather frail old man rubbing his eyes in surprise. The spotlights from two EXOs captured him in their beams. He was about five and a half feet tall and wore a rumpled blue jumpsuit. His skin was pale. A ring of hair rounded his otherwise bald head. Dark circles hugged bright intelligent eyes that he partially blocked with his liver-spotted right hand. He managed to grin as he said, “I thought you all had forgotten about me.”
I have to admit this wasn’t what I’d expected. I figured we were going for a few dead aliens, and now we had some random old guy to deal with.
What could I say? I shrugged. I guess since I couldn’t figure out a strategy, I’d go with what was easiest—the truth. “I’m Lieutenant Ben Mason from OMBRA Special Ops. Is everything okay, sir?”
“Power went down three days ago,” he said. “I’ve been locked down here in the dark since then.”
“We’re working to get the power reestablished.”
On cue, the lights snapped on and equipment began to rumble in the background.
“Did you see Paul?” he asked.
“You mean Doctor Wilson?”
“That’d be him.”
Now wouldn’t be the time to bring up what had happened to him, an
d especially what had been done to his daughter. “He’s doing fine.”
“Why is it you’re only wearing underwear?”
Good question. “I’m currently without an EXO. We’re working to fix this.”
“Quite unusual,” he said.
I couldn’t agree more. I had Olivares and Chance spread out and search. I wanted to get back into the air as soon as possible. The room ahead of us was quite large. It had been sectioned off into five rooms with portable wall dividers. One area was a living room with a large flat screen television. One was a bedroom, another a kitchen, then a bathroom. Finally, there was a space that had been sectioned off along the entire back wall for storage.
Glasses and dishware had fallen out of the kitchen cabinets and broken on the floor. Food had spilled.
“You’ll have to forgive me. I wasn’t prepared for company.” When I didn’t respond, he asked, “What is it you’re looking for?”
“We’re here to get two alien specimens.”
His eyes narrowed but his smile remained. “Specimens. Sounds like you’re going to dissect them.”
I shook my head. “Nothing of the sort.”
“Then what are you going to do with them?”
“Sorry, sir. I can’t divulge that information. It’s on a need to know basis only.”
Now his smile did falter. “Then I’m afraid I won’t cooperate.”
“Whatever you say, sir. Please stand aside.”
The man did as he was told, watched what was going on for a few more seconds, then shook his head as he went and plopped down on the sofa, snapped on the television, and started watching an old episode of Doctor Who.
Chance and Olivares came out of the back room carrying a ten foot box. Theyset it by the door. “Found one of them, but nothing else is back there except old ration boxes, water, and a slew of technical manuals for some sort of aircraft I’ve never seen.”
That didn’t make any sense. Keene had said both of the aliens were down here. We’d found one, now where was the other? Under the bed?
“And you’ve checked everywhere?” I asked.
“There isn’t much to this place,” Chance said.