“Did you really think you could beat me, Andrews?” His voice was barely a ragged whisper above the beeping alarm, the howling wind entering the open airlock, and the slowly winding-down engines. “Did you really think you would win?”
Without waiting for an answer, Law raised the assault rifle and aimed it at Andrews’s head.
The SCEV heaved once again, this time with great violence as the deck tilted upward at a crazy angle. The rifle fired a burst on full automatic, right across the airlock’s overhead, missing Andrews entirely as he fell backward. He bounced off the airlock’s ledge, then tumbled out of the vehicle as it crashed to a brutal halt. Andrews heard rock crumbling and metal screeching as the SCEV bucked to an explosive standstill, then he slammed into the hard ground. Fire blossomed along his right wrist and he grunted, but the pain was nothing compared to the tapestry of agony Law had crafted with his inhuman powers. As a cloud of dust boiled across him, he pushed himself to a sitting position. He felt a strange buzzing sensation in his head, and he wondered if he had suffered a concussion somewhere along the way. He looked up at the SCEV towering over him at a drunken angle. The rig had impaled itself on a spire of rock, and one of its front tires was tilted at a crazy slant. He could tell just by looking at it that the rig’s front axle had been shattered. The SCEV had gone as far as it could go.
“Mike! Mike!”
Rachel’s voice sounded tinny and distant over the radio. Andrews made to answer, but he couldn’t form any words. He cleared his throat, staring up at the SCEV. He felt like he was swimming in a world full of cotton, and most of it had managed to wind up in his mouth.
“Rachel,” he croaked. “Stay where you are. I love you, baby.” He tasted blood in his mouth, and he felt more pain in his chest when he breathed. Cracked ribs, if I’m lucky.
Law appeared then, slumping against the doorway of the opened airlock. He looked down at Andrews with bleary eyes, moving unsteadily. His face and the front of his dark, rancid garments were soaked in blood, but he still held onto the assault rifle. He slowly raised it, bringing it to bear on Andrews.
“Why?” Andrews shouted suddenly. “Why? All we wanted were the core supports. If your people hadn’t attacked us, we would’ve been gone by sundown!”
Law smiled crookedly. He paused to spit out a bloodied, fragmented tooth, then looked down at Andrews as he sat in the dust. “After all we’ve been through … after years of disease, famine, violence … you expect me to believe your intentions were nothing but honorable? Tell me another one.” He waved an arm, indicating the dark, storm-torn wasteland surrounding them. “Look at all you’ve done. Look at the legacy of mankind. Your kind’s a plague on the planet!”
“Your people are going to die anyway!” Andrews shouted.
Law shook his head. “Think so? That we can’t survive another day without your supposed help? We’ve sucked it up for a decade, Andrews! Though the sickness still claims many of us, with every generation, we become stronger. We adapt.”
Andrews laughed. “Adapt? Adapt for what? Take a look around, pal—there’s nothing left to inherit! You’ve got all these mental powers—you know we could’ve helped all of you to live as people again!”
“People destroyed the planet, Captain,” Law said wearily. “My family will live. They’ll be better than what we were before. Something admirable.”
“Admirable, huh?” Andrews chuckled humorlessly. “Try amoral, you sick fuck. It’s a much better fit.”
“History’s written by the winners.” Law seemed to gather his remaining strength. He pushed himself upright and stepped away from the airlock’s sill. He shouldered his rifle and aimed it squarely at Andrews’s head. “I’m sorry, Andrews. But it’s just too late for me to take any more chances.”
Light flared suddenly through the gloom, shining across the SCEV’s battered frame. Law looked up, and his mouth opened in frank shock as the illumination grew in intensity. A growing wail could be heard above the wind, and gravel crunched behind Andrews. He turned and looked over his shoulder, wondering if what he saw was a mirage or merely wishful thinking.
Emerging from the clouds of dust behind him were two SCEVs. Their minigun turrets were fixed on SCEV Four as they braked to a halt fifty meters away, their engines spooling down, their floodlight arrays blazing.
“No …” Law’s voice was barely audible above the din of the storm and the idling rigs sitting nearby. “No, no, no, no!”
Andrews snapped out of his funk. He reached into his knapsack and pulled out the M320 grenade launcher. Grabbing its pistol grip in his right hand, he flicked off the safety and raised it, pointing it right at Law. Law became aware of this a moment too late, and both men fired at the same time. A hail of bullets slashed at the ground right in front of Andrews, peppering him with debris. At the same time, the grenade launcher bucked lightly in his hand, and the forty-millimeter round slammed into Law’s waist and exploded, blasting the man right in two. Ribbons of gore splattered across Andrews before he could move, and he closed his eyes instinctively. When he opened them, Law’s ragged torso lay right before him. As he watched, Law’s remaining arm flailed about, grasping at air, fingers curled into claws. Their eyes met, and Law’s lips moved soundlessly. Blood bubbled upward from deep inside him, and whatever Law was trying to say was lost as he choked on his own fluids. The light faded from his eyes, and Andrews watched as dust covered the mutilated corpse, turning the warm blood into a pasty crust.
He became aware of someone calling his name. He looked up as a figure loomed over him. It was Mulligan, and his white environmental suit was almost brown with filth.
“Mulligan,” he said, stupidly. “You made it.”
Mulligan nodded, looking down at the disfigured corpse. “So did you.”
Other suited figures appeared. They reached down for Andrews and, as they hauled him to his feet, another jolt of pain from his injured ribs made him pass out.
26
Laird, Leona, Kelly, and Rachel had been taken down from the ridgeline. All were alive, though Laird and Leona had been injured in Law’s missile attack. The Hellfire had detonated thirty meters from their position, and both had taken shrapnel and shock damage from the blast, but were expected to survive. They were conscious and mostly alert when they were brought aboard SCEV Seven, which had been designated as the medical evacuation vehicle. Andrews, Kelly, Laird, and Leona were stationed in the vehicle’s rear compartment, where two medics and the base surgeon tended to them. Andrews had suffered a broken left wrist and, as he had thought, several cracked ribs, but his injuries were considered light. Laird and Leona both had concussions and lacerations that needed to be cleaned and sterilized due to their exposure to the elements, and Kelly was in severe pain from her fractured femur. The surgeon elected to wait until they returned to Harmony to set the break, but his portable X-ray and follow-on ultrasound diagnostics revealed she hadn’t suffered any major blood vessel damage. She would have a difficult recovery, but she would live.
Once everyone was stabilized, they returned to the base in SCEV Seven. Mulligan remained behind to assist in the recovery of the core supports, and by the time the rig returned to the base, he had already reported that the supports were in good condition. Rachel had been right; while they couldn’t stand up to an immeasurably more powerful earthquake, the objects were tough enough to survive an explosion caused by an anti-tank weapon. Upon their return to base, Andrews and the others were transported by litter down a personnel evacuation stairway, one that had lain dormant for almost ten years. There wasn’t enough power available to operate the vehicular lift, so they had to be transported to the base by manpower. Andrews wanted to walk and save everyone the effort of carrying him, but the base surgeon overruled him. He would be transported like the rest of the wounded, his dignity be damned.
“Look at it this way, you get a hero’s welcome no matter how you get home,” Rachel had said to him on the way down the dark, winding staircase. She had been ordered to retu
rn to the base with the others, even though she had offered to assist in the recovery operation. It had been decided that she had been in the field more than long enough, and for that, Andrews was thankful. With the storm bearing down on them, he didn’t want her exposed to the environment any longer than she already had been.
SCEV Three remained on the surface for another day, the core supports secured safely aboard as her crew weathered out the storm. There was no way they could enter the base while the storm raged above in full fury; there were far too many obscurants, and the radioactive fallout stirred up by the storm was lethal even through an environmental suit. Rachel had told them the core supports would be lightning magnets, and that settled the issue. No one was willing to venture out with the supports; not because they might be killed, but because Mother Nature might deliver some award-winning examples of bolt lightning that could compromise the supports, wasting the team’s hard work and sacrifice.
The base was dark and gloomy. Air quality was poor even though some intrepid engineers had pulled the batteries from the remaining SCEVs and used them to power the air scrubbers. They had to be run in staggered shifts to preserve the batteries. Recharging them required starting up an SCEV, and no one wanted to add poisonous exhaust to the mix, so power rationing was the standing order. The air smelled of sweat and oil, just like an SCEV after a long foray into the field. The difference was that there was the added tint of untreated sewage, which Andrews found more than slightly unpleasant.
But hey, at least I’m alive.
Which was better than three other people who had passed away while he was out on the mission. The injuries they had sustained during the earthquake were too grave, even with the sophisticated medical expertise available. Sometimes, Andrews knew, it was just a person’s time to go. He thought about Spencer and Choi and felt guilty about their loss, regardless. At least they had gone down fighting. Fate had just given them the short straw.
Once the core supports had been brought into the base, it took another two days to install them and test the power generation equipment in the Core. After the systems had been validated, power was slowly restored to the base, level by level, with a few exceptions. The medical section was given priority for power allocation, as were the environmental systems. Over the course of another two days, Harmony Base came alive again, with heat, hot water, sterilized air, and light. Repair work continued day and night, and Andrews thought that after a month or so, no one would even be able to tell that the base had been severely damaged.
On the eighth day after recovery was completed and all systems were stabilized, a memorial service was held in the Commons Area. While all the bodies of the dead had been incinerated as soon as possible—the base’s designers had provided a mortuary as well, because even when the world ended, survivors would continue to die—the command group had decided that funeral proceedings were to take place. To provide a degree of closure. A large memorial had been erected on one wall just after the war. Previously, only a small handful of bronze plates had been affixed to it, but dozens more had been added over the past few weeks. Each plate bore the inscribed names of the deceased, their birthdates, and the day they died. All the new additions had passed away in the first two weeks of June. Andrews, his wrist in a cast and his ribs bound, joined the line of survivors who filed past the memorial. He knew every name there, some better than others, but each bronze nameplate equaled a hole that would never be filled. Even though he had intended to be strong, to be the rock, he found that when he finally made it to the end of the line, he couldn’t hold back his tears any longer. Seeing Spencer and Choi’s names, and knowing how young they had been, was just too much. Even though they were a few years younger than him, they had grown up together, and he would always feel their absence.
“We’ve all been through hell and back—twice,” Benchley said in his address. From the front of the Commons Area, he regarded the assemblage with clear eyes, his voice strong. “We’ve all lost people near and dear to us—twice. First in the Sixty Minute War, then on the earthquake of June ninth, and two more in the mission to recover the supports we needed in order to survive. The very fabric of our society here has had a hole blown right through it. But we’re a strong people. We have to be, because our work is just getting started. We know now that there is life out there. It may not welcome us, it may fear us, it may distrust us, but it’s life nonetheless, and we need to do everything in our power to help those who survived the war. It’s what we’re here for. It’s what we’re all about.
“I want all of you to look to the people next to you. I want all of you to reach out to each other, and help those who are in need get through the coming weeks and months. We all grieve together, regardless of rank or position or occupation. We are Harmony Base, and even burdened by the weight of our sorrow, we have a mandate: quando mundum finit, opus nos incipiet. When the world ends, our mission begins. We need to remember our fallen, but we need to keep putting one foot in front of the other.” The general paused, then looked at Mulligan, who stood at attention nearby. “Look around you. Find those who have lost their way and help them get back onto the path because we need to walk it … together.”
A lone bugler clad in a spic-and-span Army Class A uniform played Taps. Mulligan, whose own Class As were accentuated by his green Special Forces beret, held rule over a formation of honorary pall bearers. All wore black arm bands. Andrews watched the assemblage as they picked up the ceremonial interment flag and neatly folded it into a tight triangle. Mulligan took the flag and marched toward Benchley, presenting it to the base commanding officer. Benchley accepted the flag with a grave expression, then returned Mulligan’s sharp salute. Mulligan turned and dismissed the detail tersely, and they filed out of the Commons Area, preceded by the base’s colors. Benchley and the command staff exited as well, marching in step in keeping with the protocols of a military service. Others slowly followed, but many more remained, sniffling, grieving, weeping.
Jeremy approached them, his eyes red, his expression downbeat. He looked up at Andrews and Rachel and forced a specter of a smile to his face as he embraced both of them. “I’m proud of you two,” he said. “So incredibly proud, you have no idea.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Andrews said.
Jeremy released them, then reached out and touched Rachel’s cheek. “Especially you, young lady. You really proved your stuff out there, and in a big way. Think you’ll go military now?”
Rachel blinked. “Why do you ask that?”
“You’re young, and you have an adventurous spirit. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to see you leave the Core,” he said, sparing Andrews a wink, “but who knows? Maybe you’re cut out for field work, yourself.”
Rachel favored both of them with a pale, distracted smile. “I hadn’t really thought of that. Maybe that’s something to consider. Excuse me for just a second.” She turned and walked toward the line forming in front of the memorial wall.
“Well, maybe that was the wrong thing to say,” Jeremy said.
Andrews shook his head. “Nah. She’s not upset with you, Dad. She’s just …” He shrugged. “She’s just not herself, these days.”
“That’ll change. She’s young. She’ll heal.”
Jeremy embraced him again and planted a kiss on his forehead, a display that would have embarrassed both of them weeks before. But after the earthquake and the reminder that life was so incredibly fragile, things like that no longer seemed to matter.
“I’ve got to get back to the Core,” Jeremy said, his voice full of apologies. “There’s still a lot to be done. Tell Rachel she has a couple of days off if she needs them.”
“I’ll pass it on.”
Jeremy clapped his son on the shoulder. “Are you really my son? I can’t believe I got so lucky with a winner like you.”
“Blame Mom,” Andrews said, smiling weakly. He found he suddenly missed his mother, even though he hadn’t thought of her in weeks. He felt a strong pang of guilt when he realized
that.
“Nothing to blame her for,” Jeremy said, looking down at his feet for a moment. “She did right by both of us, but you got the best part of her. And thank God for that.” He cleared his throat and wiped his eyes. “All right. I’ve got to go.”
Andrews nodded. “I’ll see you later. Take care of yourself, Dad.”
Jeremy clapped his shoulder again. “Don’t worry about me, son. I’m fine. Look after Rachel.” He stepped away, walking toward one of the exits.
This Is the End: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (7 Book Collection) Page 72