“That’s a heckuva nice friend,” Grunfeld offered.
Quarrels smiled, remembering when Alexandra, Xan, had given him a kind of pharmacological grubstake six years earlier. “I used that stash to build a bigger one and then people, as they are wont to do, became jealous.”
“I heard they started coming at you, sir.”
Quarrels nodded. “Some of them attacked me and others started rumors, started saying I was with the scuds, but that was bullshit.”
“You never took sides, did you, Mister Quarrels.”
“Not true,” Quarrels replied. “I always took the side that mattered most. My own.”
Grunfeld smiled and then pointed at the windshield. “They’re here, sir.”
Quarrels could see the outline of a Syndicate transport craft out in the distance, slicing across the sky over the river. You could say many things about the aliens, Quarrels thought, but they were always on time. Once a month he would meet them here and deliver several crates of freshly manufactured Sunshine along with whatever derogatory information he’d been able to collect. Today was no different.
Quarrels had five crates to hand over today along with some info on the purported whereabouts of a small group who periodically ambushed the Syndicate and his own people. While the resistance had been put down, there still were bands of scavengers and bandits, punks, castoffs from the handful of resistance fighters still alive who’d attacked three of his trucks over the last two weeks, and killed two of his men. They were dead-enders he thought, losers who’d decided to target him because he was successful and had refused to take sides when the resistance took up arms. He’d been approached a year or two earlier by some of the resistance leadership, but refused to back them. In point of fact he’d explicitly warned them to stand down, that there was no way they’d be able to overcome the aliens’ overwhelming technological edge, but they wouldn’t listen and paid the price.
Exiting the truck, Quarrels popped a small smoke marker grenade and flung it out in front of him. Red smoke billowed upwards and the alien transport craft landed in the middle of the highway. He held up a hand in a gesture of goodwill at a small delegation of Syndicate soldiers, half human, half alien, who were led by a scud lieutenant, a tall man with piercing eyes who wore a black combat jacket emblazoned with the Syndicate snake. The lieutenant, Heidler, watched his troopers trudge past, headed toward the back of the truck. Heidler tossed a smile at Quarrels along with a small flask of whiskey. Just as he’d done for the past five months, Heidler had taken a long pull from the flask, before handing it over to Quarrels. Quarrels drank, the whiskey sour, scorching his throat.
“I assume your trip was uneventful?” Heidler asked.
“Yeah, aside from the surface of the roads. How about talking to your boy one of these days about re-paving them,” Quarrels replied, lobbing the flask back to Heidler.
“Civic improvements ain’t all that high on the Viceroy’s list,” Heidler replied.
“What is?”
“Hunting down insurgents.”
“Thought that was already taken care of,” Quarrels said with a smirk. “If memory serves, all the troublemakers were taken to the deep end of the pool last December if you know what I mean.”
Heidler pursed his lips and nodded. “Most were dealt with, but there are always a few that slip through the cracks. Course you’d know that better than anyone, being out in the world and all.”
“If you were a purveyor of valuable information, Quarrels, which I’m not suggesting you are, what advice might you have for the Viceroy?”
“I’d tell him to take a hard look at Suitland,” Quarrels said, referencing a small Maryland enclave only a few miles past the D.C. border. “I’ve seen some troubling things. Tire tracks down ghost roads, new walls and windows around some of the houses, along with piles of fresh earth moved around, big ones, the kind that you need a ‘dozer to push around.”
“Earth as in ... what? Somebody’s building tunnels?”
“It’s either that or somebody’s decided to start flipping houses again.” Quarrels smirked at his witty reply. He knew the Syndicate was paranoid that its enemies were digging tunnels to hide contraband and weapons in a ring around the city.
“You think what you saw, the tunnels, the improvements, might be a hint at something bigger?” Heidler asked.
Quarrels shrugged. “Dunno, but every flood starts with a raindrop doesn’t it?”
Heidler registered this. “Where might these tunnels be?”
“Area down past the old Naval Maritime Intel Center. Right on the other side of the parkway,” Quarrels replied. This was mostly bullshit, since the evidence of the tunnels had been created by Quarrels’s own men. It was something he did periodically to show how valuable he was to the Viceroy. He’d have his boys go out and dig up some ground or tag some buildings with resistance graffiti and then he’d self-report to the Syndicate. There was always the chance that the scuds would find out what he’d done and then there’d likely be hell to pay, but at the moment it was a risk worth taking.
Heidler grinned. “Much obliged as always.” He looked like he was readying to leave and then leaned back to Quarrels a final time. “Keep your eyes peeled for strangers by the way.”
“Everyone’s a stranger until you know them,” Quarrels answered cryptically.
“There was a ship that crashed nine miles from here.” Quarrels immediately thought of the explosion and the smoke earlier rising up over the plains.
“What kind of ship?”
“That’s strictly need to know, Quarrels,” Heidler replied. He tipped an imaginary hat and turned and ran after his men, melting into the interior of the transport ship that rose up and flew back over the Potomac River. Quarrels waved at the ship until it could no longer be seen.
“How come you do it?” a voice said.
Quarrels glanced sideways to see Grunfeld, leaning against the side of the truck.
“I mean, you know who they are and what they’ve done, sir.”
“Indeed I do,” Quarrels replied.
“So how come you put up with their shit?”
“Because everybody gotta answer to somebody else, kid. That is a goddamn, universal truth. One of the few things the invasion didn’t change.”
And with that, Quarrels entered the truck and slumped in his seat.
A thousand yards away, a drone the size of a butterfly was spying on Quarrels and Grunfeld. It had recorded footage of them speaking and slowly rotated and buzzed back across a field to a blind where two men in full ghillie suits with masks crouched.
One of the men had a sniper rifle mounted over a fallen tree. He could’ve easily taken down Quarrels or Heidler, but now was not the time. He withdrew the rifle and watched the tiny drone motor pass his head and land in the palm of another man who removed his camouflage mask to reveal Luke, the resistance fighter who’d stayed behind at Shiloh, rather than venture to the time ship.
Luke’s face was bearded, haggard and wan, his eyes hooded and bloodshot.
He pulled a small metal case from a pocket, inserted the drone inside and snapped it shut. Luke looked over as the other man removed his mask to reveal Dan, the young resistance fighter who’d guarded Samantha back at Shiloh.
“You should’ve let me dirt nap that bastard,” Dan said, slinging the rifle over his shoulder. The pair began walking back through the woods. Luke was out in front, keeping close to trees, never straying into the open.
“Quarrels is just one man.”
“He’s the ringleader,” Dan answered. “He’s the goddamn pusher and I should’ve taken him out.”
Luke stopped and looked back at Dan. “So you take your shot and take him down and then what?”
“I work my way up the food chain,” Dan said with a grin.
“Bullshit. You take that shot and every drone from here to Alexandria is on our ass. They follow us back and then what happens?”
“We take a stand.”
“How
’d that work out for us last time?” Luke asked.
Dan’s face flushed. “So what then? We hang out here in the woods, spying on people, running around and sucking on it?”
“No, we make ourselves small and we watch and we wait.”
“For what?”
“The right opportunity. They’ll let their guard down eventually and when they do, when they least expect it, we’ll strike.”
Dan considered this and then nodded, following after Luke as the two melted into the shadows of the late day. They moved like hunters through the woods, climbing fences, ducking over grassy slopes, crisscrossing suburban streets and cul-de-sacs. Periodically, they stopped to check minute cameras and tiny listening devices that they’d placed at strategic locations, everything connected to a solar battery that was concealed under a thicket at the roadside. The various devices gave them the ability to see what was happening in the ‘burbs at all times, the information sent back through routing devices to their home base. If anyone was moving around the surrounding areas, they’d know about it.
At a four-way intersection marked by a stop sign centered with a spray-painted silver eye, Dan jogged across the street and grabbed a pry bar they kept hidden in a metal box buried under a few inches of dirt. Hesitating, to make sure nobody had followed, he eased over to a manhole cover that rested atop a network of suburban sewers. Inserting the pry bar into the lip of the cover, Dan gritted his teeth and pushed down.
The cover lifted and Dan jimmied the bar in a few more inches. Luke assisted, the pair managing to pull the cover aside.
The two dropped down four feet into a cement and brick chamber. Dan reached up and repositioned the cover and stowed the pry bar on a metal hook bolted into the brick wall. Luke crouched and popped an chemlight he carried in a shirt pocket to guide them down into the ground. He explained that he had found an old stash of them.
Having returned from reconnaissance missions this very way dozens of times over the last year or so, Luke could walk the path to their outpost blindfolded. Using the sewer was a pain in the ass, but it ensured that nobody would follow them, and if someone did, they’d be in a world of hurt. Dan had periodically wired booby traps in the main sewer line such that anybody unlucky enough to try and track them would be in for a surprise.
The pair scurried down through the darkened tunnels, Dan occasionally stopped to make sure they circumvented a loop of wire or a landmine he’d hidden in a mound of debris. Luke held up the chemlight at one point, watching Dan search for a pressure-plate that was hidden in the soupy water underfoot.
“If only Quinn, Gio, and the others could see us now.”
Dan snorted. “Hiding down in a sewer, trying not to blow ourselves up…”
“Things would’ve been different if they’d made it.”
Dan looked back at Luke who continued, “We would’ve taken the fight to the scuds years ago.”
“And getting our asses kicked sooner, would’ve done what for the resistance?” Dan asked.
“We would’ve found a way to beat them.”
“That’s what’s you said last winter.”
Luke’s head hung. “We caught them off guard didn’t we?”
“And lost almost everybody in the process. Only reason you and me are here is because those bastards had too many targets to shoot at.”
“It’ll be different next time,” Luke said.
Dan shook his head, returning to continue his search for the pressure plate. “There’s no way we can beat them in a conventional fight, Luke. The only thing we can do is find a way to bleed them.”
Luke smiled at this. “I’d really love to test your theory out.”
“Next chance we get,” Dan replied, before holding up a hand. “Got it.”
He signaled for Luke to move forward and then the two gingerly stepped over the hidden mine and continued down into the belly of the sewer.
Fifteen minutes later, they crawled out of the sewer and scurried down an alley that led to a massive, abandoned Baptist Church: “The Church Of The One Faith, One God, One Baptism.” There were a set of storm doors at the rear of the property, concealed under a thicket of branches and debris glued to a length of pressure-treated plywood. Dan pulled the plywood away and Luke opened the storm doors, and they descended into the church’s basement, their home, their operations center.
The basement, which had been taken over by a group of long-dead survivalists after the initial alien invasion, had been radically renovated. The walls had been strengthened with cement block, and the ground excavated an additional nine feet, such that there was another floor directly beneath the basement.
Dan bolted the storm doors closed, turning to see Luke who triggered a battery of motion sensitive lights that snapped on to reveal a space resembling a high-tech yard sale by way of the captain’s berth on a submarine. One wall was covered with electronics, tablets, surveillance gear, and a battery of computer monitors and transmission devices that played constant images of everything shot by the cameras and tracking devices they had hidden in the surrounding areas.
Another wall was fronted by several bookcases and long metal tables that were covered in tiny gizmos and metal gears and all sorts of parts for machines and weapons. There were metal lockers at the back of the basement that contained an innumerable number of killing devices, rifles, pistols, grenades, rocket launchers, and everything in between. Luke sighed, remembering the days when the basement had been filled with other resistance fighters. But that was before the uprising the prior winter, an attack that Luke helped plan and orchestrate.
They had solid intelligence from the other side of the wall. They’d been told that the aliens had let down their guard, believing that the resistance wasn’t capable of staging a substantive attack in the winter, let alone in the dark.
How many fighters had taken part in the battle? Luke plumbed his memory. Thousands … tens of thousands in various cities in America and overseas. It was going to be like the Tet Offensive back during the Vietnam War another fighter had said, and indeed it was. Just as in Vietnam, there was a coordinated attack on enemy bases and strongholds and just as in Vietnam, the attackers were eventually defeated by overwhelming firepower and technological superiority. Nearly ninety-percent of the fighters from the resistance cells in and around Washington, D.C., had been killed during the battle. Luke studied the empty spaces all around and suddenly felt very small and insignificant.
Dan moved down the staircase to the lowest level in the church. A series of overhead lights hissed to life to reveal a mad scientist’s wet dream. Three metal tracks were bolted to the ceiling and ran the length of the room and hanging from the tracks were a dozen six-foot or taller drones in various states of disrepair.
Beneath this, in rows, were little mounds of bird-sized drones and tiny machines no bigger than the butterfly-sized drone that Dan and Luke had used earlier when surveilling Quarrels and Heidler. Dan moved toward one of the drones, a pewter-colored, three-foot tall machine that was shaped like a cigar.
He lifted the device and sat it down on a bench where he admired its metal contours. It was originally an alien drone that he’d shot down with a sniper rifle. After it crashed, he quickly disabled the tracking device inside and brought it back to the church where he’d made a few modifications.
Dan tapped a button on the side of the drone and short wings distended. Inside the wings were cavities that Dan had hollowed out to carry explosives. Reaching up, he popped open a port on the back of the drone that contained its GPS system and targeting software. Having been able to hack the technology, Dan was certain, when the time came, that he’d be able to load the drone up with explosives and fly it into something of his choosing.
When the time was right, he’d make the bastards pay for everything they’d done to the planet. He tapped another button on the drone and its engine powered to life, lifting the device a few feet off the bench. Dan stared at it, hovering a few feet away from him. Just the thought of it, of us
ing one of the scuds’ weapons against them, was enough to bring a smile to his lips.
22
Parting Ways
Quinn followed Giovanni as he shadowed Barrows around the basement. Above, the others were planning their routes, discussing where they would go to find out what had happened to their friends and teams. The two men were in the middle of a heated discussion, with Barrows shaking his head.
“Giovanni needs a guide into the Green Zone,” Quinn replied. “But the rest of us, we’re going up there.”
Barrows grinned. “Just like that, huh? You fall outta the goddamn sky and think you’re just gonna walk into the most heavily guarded city in the world?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
Barrows looked to Quinn. “Talk to me, Quinn. If your goal is to drive me insane, we only got a few more miles to go.”
“Can we meet your contact?” she asked.
“Mister Q just don’t take meetings,” Barrows replied. “It ain’t like he’s got a secretary who does his scheduling and shit.”
“We’re seeing him in two hours,” Locks offered, as Barrows shot him a nasty look. It was obvious to Quinn that Barrows did not want that information to come out.
“Perfect,” Quinn said, smiling warmly. “We can all meet up with your friend and discuss the situation.”
“He ain’t nobody’s friend,” Barrows replied, kicking at the ground. “But if you want to go meet him, I’ll take you along. After that we’re all free and clear. We go our separate ways, you hear me?”
Quinn looked to Giovanni, then nodded.
“If you all are carrying on with this, now would be as good a time as any,” Riot stated.
“For what?” Cody asked, but Quinn knew she was referring to the discussion earlier.
“Gotta find their people,” Quinn answered.
Riot nodded. “We’ll be out there, waiting for your signal. Just let us know, but right now, we have to do what we can to find them.”
The others agreed, and after quick hand-shakes and hugs, the three freed prisoners from the time ship took off.
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