Nicolas keyed his radio. They’d been so completely compromised that there was no longer any point in maintaining radio silence. “Deploy the Mortars and call down preset fire on Point Lee,” he ordered. He’d do anything to delay the enemy and buy time for the vast majority of resistance fighters to escape. “Don’t worry about exposing the weapons now; we can’t take them with us.”
A burst of static swept over the radio and jammed it, but a moment later the mortars opened fire anyway, firing shells off towards Point Lee. He saw flashes of light in the distance as the first shells came crashing down on top of the advancing aliens, before another streak of light came down from high above and blew the mortars into flaming plasma. He saw a man running from the impact point, screaming while his body burned with unquenchable flames, and drew his pistol, taking aim and shooting him through the head. There was no other choice, yet it killed him to shoot one of his own men.
He rekeyed the radio and was almost deafened by the sudden burst of static. The alien jamming system was hellishly effective…and they’d had almost no warning at all of its existence, even though he’d used jammers himself in operations against terrorists. It didn’t happen very often. Terrorists displayed a touching faith in cell phones and short-range radios, believing them to be perfectly secure, and it wasn't uncommon for assault forces to be tracked right up to their targets.
“The radios are down,” he snapped, removing the headset and wincing at the sound of heavy gunfire in the distance. It sounded as if the advancing aliens had run into the first set of ambush sites, with carefully hidden machine guns pouring fire into their advancing units. It wouldn’t be long before their friend from high above destroyed the machine gun nests and cleared the way – indeed, he was surprised that the camp was still largely intact. The only explanation that made sense was that the enemy wanted to take some prisoners and interrogate them, or they would have wiped out the entire camp in the first pass. “Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir?” Sergeant White said. He was a short unflappable man, armed with a heavy machine gun and two pistols strapped to his belt, giving him a vaguely piratical air. “Sir?”
“Start the evacuation procedure,” Nicolas said, calling to mind the surrounding area. He’d walked through it often enough to learn how it could be used for defence or offence, and he was fairly sure that the aliens or the Order Police would be unfamiliar with the area. “Group One heads north; Group Two head south. We’ll meet up using the covert rendezvous point at Point Shiloh.”
“Yes, sir,” Sergeant White said. He looked over a bunch of newly-awakened soldiers carrying weapons and looking eager for the scrap. “You lot; get to the evacuation points now and get ready to leave. Sir?”
“Designate my group as part of the rearguard,” Nicolas said, coldly. He saw the reluctance on the Sergeant’s face and felt his temper flare. They didn’t have time to argue. “You take Group One and get them the fuck out of here – don’t argue, just do it!”
“Yes, sir,” the Sergeant said. “Don’t hang about too long.”
Nicolas nodded and raced towards the command tent. The flames were still spreading through the camp, but luckily they hadn’t obliterated the command tent yet. He’d been on enough secret missions to know that nothing, but the strictest of precautions would maintain operational security, even if the mission was thoroughly compromised and they were trying desperately to get the hell out of Dodge. Two former clerks from the army looked up at him as they struggled to get papers into a secured case, silently hoping that he’d tell them that it was all fine and they didn’t have to destroy anything. Nicolas shook his head.
“Grab your weapons and get to the evacuation points,” he ordered. The two men had been practicing their shooting ever since they joined up with his forces, but part of him considered them a liability. He’d have let them go if he hadn’t known that they’d be swept up by the alien dragnet and they’d be given, at the least, a life sentence in one of the alien detention camps. “Get out, now!”
They fled, leaving him behind in the command tent. He worked like a demon sorting out the small collection of maps and encoded notes he’d made, thoughts about what the cell could do to the aliens in the next few weeks. Those plans would all have to be abandoned now, with the maps and notes utterly destroyed. Luckily, they were produced on paper that burned easily and completely, leaving nothing, but grainy ash. He sprayed flammable liquid around the tent anyway – paused long enough to pick up a picture of Nancy when she’d been a baby – and dropped a detonator on the floor. The heat of the other fires was much closer when he left the tent, and the sound of shooting was much closer, yet he kept moving. A moment later, a wave of fire consumed the command tent in a blaze of white-hot heat. There would be no traces left of the documents and nothing to betray their future plans to the enemy. They wouldn’t even be able to locate any DNA traces they could compare against their massive database of Americans.
“Sir, the charges are all set and the two groups are on their way out of here,” Sergeant White said. “I left Group One with Pilgrim…”
“I thought I ordered you to lead the group out of here,” Nicolas said, dryly. The sound of an alien plasma gun echoed out in the distance and he cursed under his breath. “You shouldn’t have stayed behind.”
“My job is to make damn sure that you get your ass out of here, if you’ll pardon my French, sir,” Sergeant White said. Behind them, the fire had spread to the remaining tents. It wouldn’t be long before the charges detonated and the ammunition supply went up like a bomb. The thought of losing the carefully-stockpiled supply of military-grade high explosive – and explosive produced by locals with some knowledge of advanced chemistry – was heartbreaking. “There’s nothing left here for the rearguard to defend.”
“True,” Nicolas agreed. The enemy were drawing closer, and losing patience. The alien craft high above was firing down now, carefully eliminating each ambush position one by one. The shooting seemed to be coming from all around them, which suggested that Group One and Two had run into enemy ambushes and had been forced to try to punch their way through. “Come on, then.”
He blew a whistle as loudly as he could, hoping that it would be heard over the din of battle. Only a handful of men had been ordered to take part in the rearguard – the noisemakers that were being detonated even now should have convinced the aliens that there were far more humans in the camp than there really were – and they should be making their way to the third evacuation point now. He picked up a modified cell phone and glanced down at its display, noticing how it still showed that it was linked to a satellite high overhead. The collaborators had claimed that the aliens had restored cell phone networks – and even improved on the various contracts being offered by the different providers – but it hadn’t escaped the bloggers’ collective notice that all calls would be routed through an alien-designed computer network. The bloggers had encouraged kids to make phone calls where they gleefully used words that would trigger any observing program – everything from ‘bomb’ to ‘alien bastards’ – and hopefully annoy the aliens and force them to waste their time. A handful of kids had been picked up and disappeared by the Order Police and that put a stop to that. Their grieving parents had been natural recruits for the resistance.
“Time’s up,” he said, clicking the phone. “ET; phone home.”
He pushed down hard on the button. A moment later, carefully emplaced charges detonated around the camp, blowing up right in the face of the advancing aliens and obliterating anything they might have been able to use to track the resistance fighters down. They’d have seen the fireball for miles around. He picked himself off the ground – the shockwave had knocked him over - threw the cell phone away as hard as he could and ran towards the third evacuation point. Only four men were waiting for him there, clutching their weapons with grim determination. The others had clearly been killed in the fighting.
“Sir, Lewis didn’t make it,” one of them said. “Jason and Tom boug
ht the farm; Lewis was wounded and volunteered to stay behind and cover our retreat. He would have been on top of one of the charges when it blew.”
“I understand,” Nicolas said. They’d mourn later, if they lived until the dawn. The sound of shooting was growing louder again, even through the ringing in his ears. “Move out!”
Sergeant White took point as they slipped down the ravine towards the east. They’d picked the location for the camp because it would have been very hard for an enemy force to completely encircle the camp and trap them, although he knew that it would have been possible if the enemy deployed enough men and supporting equipment. It didn’t sound as if they were completely surrounded, but judging from what little he could hear, the enemy had caught at least one of the escaping groups and had engaged them in a thunderous firefight. Every particle of his being screamed for him to go to their aid, but there was nothing he could do. Quite apart from his final duties to his people, he couldn’t do anything, apart from escape. Trying to fight a stand-up battle with the aliens would have been suicide.
He smiled as he saw the lights of an alien craft high overhead, descending towards the remains of the camp. Even now, the camp was nothing more than a blazing ruin, yet they seemed to believe that they could recover something from the fire. The aliens had certainly been able to transport vast amounts of water from the sea to put out fires in Washington – they’d done it after he’d shot down their massive command ship over the capital city – and he wondered if they’d do the same thing in Virginia. It might not make any difference to the final outcome, but at least it would show them that they took the resistance seriously.
“Here, sir,” Sergeant White said. “We’ll cover you.”
The hole had been dug by a rabbit months ago – the rabbit had been caught, trapped and eaten by the soldiers - but it hadn’t taken long for the resistance planners to realise that it had other uses. Someone with a sense of humour had wired one of the covert communications network nodes down in the rabbit hole, providing a secret communications system that should have been impossible for the aliens to tap, they hoped. Even if they uncovered some of the wiring, they wouldn’t be able to tap into it without making their presence obvious. He pulled his PDA out of his belt, plugged it into the wire, and tapped a pair of keys to send a pre-composed message. They had to know that his group had been compromised and all of their joint planning had to be abandoned. They would also have to prepare for the dangers of discovering that some of his people had become Walking Dead and had been converted to serving the aliens, rather than fighting them.
He sent the message and then sent a second command into the network. They’d linked it to the second set of charges under the camp itself, detonating them and blowing up the remains of the camp. It was overkill, but if they were lucky, they’d taken out as many alien warriors as possible, perhaps even an alien transport. His lips twitched bitterly as he triggered the PDA’s self-destruct and tossed it away from their position. There were only a billion aliens, after all, and if they kept killing them, America would be free inside a hundred years. Perhaps they'd even give up and go live on Mars instead.
“Time to move,” he said, grimly. “Run!”
They ran. In the pale moonlight, it was hard to find their way through rocks and trees, but somehow they avoided serious injury. The night seemed brightly lit by the towering inferno that had consumed the camp, yet shadows seemed to leap out at them, threatening their very lives. Nicolas nearly put three rounds through a tree that had looked, in the darkness, alarmingly like an alien warrior. The soldiers nearly shot a deer before realising that it was harmless. He looked up at the stars, trying to get his bearings. They were far too close to Mannington…
The ambush took them completely by surprise. Alien weapons pounded out from the shadows, illuminating the entire area in flickering multicoloured light. Sergeant White was struck by two separate bursts of light and exploded, his body literally disintegrating into dust. Two soldiers managed to fire back into the darkness before they too were blown away. Nicolas dived for cover and started to crawl away, expecting to feel an alien blast in his back at any moment, or hear the sound of alien footsteps coming after him. There was nothing, but the sound of distant shooting and faint hisses from the aliens, seconds before an explosion marked the death of his final escort. The man had triggered his grenades and blown himself – and the aliens – to hell.
They’re everywhere, he realised, as he crawled towards Mannington. The town looked eerie in the moonlight, under curfew. The Order Police had sealed all of the entrances to the town, using the blockades that the citizens had built in the early days before the invasion, but gaining entry was no problem. He needed, desperately, a place to lie low long enough to catch his strength and plan his escape. The aliens might have successfully blocked him from making his way to one of the emergency rendezvous points, or perhaps they had them staked out as well, waiting to see who walked into their trap. The sense of being completely alone rose up within him, a sense that there was nowhere he could risk going without danger. A thought surfaced in his mind and he tried to push it away, but it refused to face. There was one place he could go. He could even see his daughter again before the end.
Greg’s house was on the outskirts of Mannington, but making his way there was still a nerve-wracking experience. He slipped from shadow to shadow, watching out for the Order Police and their patrols. They might be keeping a strong profile on the streets to prevent exactly what he was doing, or perhaps they were looking for a pretext to harass the citizens. He couldn’t understand the mindset that led them to betray their country so comprehensively. What drove them to abandon the American Dream and embrace the Global Nightmare?
He finally reached Greg’s house, slipped into the back garden, and picked the lock. He wasn't surprised to see Greg sitting on the sofa, staring at a blank TV; the entire town must have heard the shouting. Greg snatched for a pistol he'd kept beside him and Nicolas held up his hands in surrender. The last thing he wanted or needed was a gunshot being heard all over town.
“It’s me,” he said, mischievously. “Can I crash at your place for a few days?”
Chapter Forty-Six
Mannington, Virginia, USA
Day 182
Greg stared at the apparition in front of him. It didn’t match his mental impression of his daughter’s father. It was caked in mud, wearing an outfit that couldn’t be called a uniform by even the most charitable observer, looking as if it had been through the wars. If it hadn’t been for the voice – and the fact he’d clearly picked his way into the back door – he would have lifted the pistol and shot him. Or at least he would have tried to shoot him. He hadn’t spent much time at the range before the Order Police had closed it down and forbidden any more gunnery practice in Mannington.
“Nicolas?” He said, finally. He knew he sounded stunned, and not a little terrified, but he couldn’t help himself. “What are you doing here?”
“They broke the nearby resistance cell,” Nicolas said. Greg found himself shaking again, more in anger than in fear. Rumours that a resistance cell was based near them had been spreading through the town for weeks – and he had known that Nicolas was somewhere nearby – but he hadn’t expected to come face to face with the reality. “They broke my resistance cell.”
Greg stood up and returned the pistol to his pocket. “Put the safety on first,” Nicolas advised, dryly. Greg flinched and drew the pistol, carefully clicked the safety back on, and put it back in his pocket. “Keep it with you at all times. You might need it.”
He looked down at the floor. “They just overran us,” he added. “I could be the only survivor left from my cell.”
Greg wanted to scream at him, to demand to know how he dared come to his house and endanger his only child, but something prevented him from screaming out loud. If the Order Police searched Mannington – and it seemed likely to them that they would search Mannington, again – they’d find Nicolas, and know that he was
related to Nancy. They'd know that Greg himself had known about the resistance cell and said nothing to them. Nancy would lose both of her fathers in one day, if she weren’t taken into custody herself. There were vile rumours surrounding what the Order Police did to young girls. No one knew how many of them were true.
“I see,” he said, finally. He wanted to shoot Nicolas and bury the body, if only to protect Nancy, but even in his tired and worn state, Nicolas could have eaten him for breakfast. A SEAL was a master at unarmed combat. “Would you like a drink?”
“Just a small one,” Nicolas said. “What’s life like here?”
“Bland,” Greg said, as he led the way into the kitchen. He’d purchased several bottles of home-brewed beer from one of the local farmers and picked one of them off the shelves, passing it over to Nicolas. The local brewing efforts had started out rivalling paint stripper, but they’d rapidly produced something that was much more drinkable. “They’re talking about bringing in new school teachers for the local school and having them design a new curriculum for the kids.”
“Give me the child at five and he will be mine for life,” Nicolas misquoted. Greg nodded grimly. It wasn't hard to know what would happen. The children would grow up on a diet of pro-alien propaganda and become good little slaves for their alien masters, living in a world where fear of the knock on the door in the middle of the night was normal, part of life. He thought about Nancy, growing up in a world that saw humans as second-class citizens, and shivered. How could he condemn her to that? “How are the Riley Families taking that?”
“They took away Papa Riley last month,” Greg said. Papa Riley was the patriarch of a clan of God-fearing Christians, God-fearing to an extent that they sometimes worried even their closest friends. They home-schooled their children and watched any new developments in the schools like hawks, often loudly campaigning for prayer in schools and compulsory bible classes for all children. “The remainder of the clan decanted somewhere to the west and we never saw them again. They’d hate it. They wouldn’t be allowed to home-school their kids any longer. They’d have to go breathe in the poisoned atmosphere at alien-run schools.”
Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot Page 42