People cheered. People cried.
And the band played on.
They didn’t play dismal songs, they played Journey.
We stood when we saw the procession just about two blocks away.
The start of it.
Ah, we could hear … “Open Arms.” Frank’s favorite Journey song.
Jack Slagel was all of thirteen and damn near stood as tall as me. He was just starting to get the Slagel build and he definitely had the look of his father and grandfather.
I caught the glimmer of pride about the same time Johnny did.
Both of us to each side of him, looked at Jack.
“This is amazing, Dad.” Jack said in awe, staring out toward the oncoming parade.
“Yeah, it is,” Johnny replied.
“All this for Pap.”
“Pap was a great man.”
“You’re like Pap.”
I smiled.
Johnny smiled.
Then Johnny leaned to his son. “So will you be. My father … his father … they were leaders in a world that was desperate. One day it’ll get better. One day you will lead them into a better world. You’ll be a hero, Jack. It’s your destiny. It’s our destiny as Slagels to lead the broken, the beaten. Uncle Hal picks up where my father left off. I’ll help him, then you’ll finish it.”
I have to admit. I cocked an eyebrow. What a hell of a responsibility he was placing on young Jack.
“And it stops with you.” Johnny touched his son’s chest “You’ll take it to the finish line.”
Jack nodded, hands behind his back, and stood a little prouder. Of course, unlike most teenagers his age, Jack, like all Slagels, had his weapon strapped to his shoulder.
I had to say I felt a tad insulted for Frank. As if he hadn’t accomplished anything in his son’s eyes.
I know what Johnny meant. We were decades away from being a perfect society or even close, especially with the LEPs. That would take years to end them, make them extinct and stop them from being the next dominating race.
Briefly I flashed into a daydream that was frightening.
A world dominated by LEP’s. It would be like Planet of the Apes, only instead of apes, it was LEPS. Where man would be the underdog. Not strong enough, their prey.
The change of song brought me out of that thought. And like the others on that platform, I stood straight, in silence and respect as the parade passed by.
But not for long.
We underestimated them, you know. The LEP’s. Underestimated their strength, numbers, intelligence and perceptiveness.
Frank Slagel was a hero, a strong force. A frightening force. His presence was felt everywhere, even with the LEP’s.
Remember I spoke of Frank’s ability to communicate with the original LEP’s behind Beginnings.
We never thought he had some other connection with them.
But the moment the parade made it nearly to the end, when the coffin faded from view, that was the moment if began.
They were there, hiding, waiting, and they attacked. Multitudes of them pounced upon the unsuspecting mourners.
It was almost as if they feared Frank. Feared his strength, and they sensed he was gone, and they no longer had the fear.
Like a wallet in the old days, most men carried a gun. But guns were almost useless against the LEP’s. Only armor penetrating bullets worked and there wasn’t enough of those.
Bullets did, however, stun the LEP’s.
People ran into buildings for cover.
For some reason, and this is odd, the LEP never really learned how to open doors. So when people went inside, they were safe.
It still didn’t stop the destruction.
The city was destroyed. They took over.
People escaped via underground sewer systems.
The war had begun.
25.
The Turn
We didn’t live in huts, or hide in trees, but we had to retreat.
Although we kept our technology, we had to do so behind walls of valor.
We build protective walls against the LEPs.
That was the only way to live.
And it still wasn’t good.
They became smarter as they got older and bigger. Man, these things were huge.
But we started to learn about them as well.
Johnny Slagel took over the Army and adopted his father’s plan of attack. Hit the camps and the cities where they lived. Hit them before they hit us.
But they started to outnumber us.
Virginia was their base, and they destroyed that city.
Just animals, and they lived in filth.
They destroyed Boston York and moved south.
We drove them from three cities with nuclear weapons before we realized that it was a terrible error. We were driving them from the base.
.
It was a war, a civil war. I talked about the Planet of the Apes, we had almost become that. They hunted us.
They fed off of us.
Strangely enough, for as intelligent as they became, they never adapted to our speech, they had their own. They never practiced science, they were like animals. They lived for survival.
And they never learned how to turn a doorknob.
It was easy to hide from them, because they didn’t seek you out.
Like a dog chasing you. You slam the door, the dog barks at the door, maybe scratches it.
That’s sort of what they did.
Chase you. Hit the door three times, bellow out and leave.
When they hit the cities, when the packs were too much for our guards to take out, we just took cover.
We had bomb shelters and if too many took over a protected city, we used a napalm style bomb to wipe them out.
Sure we lost our homes, but they lost their lives.
They had no weapons, that was the advantage we had over them.
But that was absolutely no way to live.
And horribly enough they were taking over.
There were a few things we did learn about them. They hated the cold. Although they were created to withstand the elements, they moved slower and simply had no agility. They also knew they couldn't feed in the cold unless it was off of us.
We couldn’t feed in the cold either, but we had the ability to build greenhouses and indoor gardens.
They hated the open air.
Like fields, anything wide open, they avoided. Instinctively they sought cover. Forests and trees were great hiding places as were buildings without doors.
They also drowned instantly because they couldn’t swim,
We would just lure them to water and the ones that were really dumb just went in.
We started constructing most of our homes around bodies of water.
We had to keep any woman excreting pheromones because of ovulation hidden away. The scent of the women was a calling card and a dinner bell to them.
And they didn’t just kill the women.
Some of them raped our women.
We had a few survive the rapes.
We had a few give birth to LEP babies.
They were more human, but still LEPS.
We needed effective weapons against them in one on one battles and for attacks.
Then we needed to mass-produce the weapons because we couldn’t take a chance on not having enough guns or ammo.
Hal Slagel took over as President in 2041. He served for seven years and died in 2048. As funny as it was, I was elected. I was sixty-five years old and uncertain how long I would serve.
Keep in mind we didn’t live like peasants or like prey. We lived a normal economic structured society, but under lock and key.
The two major issues we had to deal with were the LEPS and illness. Because basically, as time moved on, the educators passed on and the doctors of yesterday were gone.
Books were the only source of medical knowledge we had and we did the best we could.
I wanted Billy to instruct the next generation.
Unfortunately, I had to put Billy elsewhere. I had to put him on weapons.
Like his father, he excelled.
He invented and perfected the first efficient working laser weapon in 2050.
There were the handheld laser weapons, and the ones that blasted a pulse. The pulse weapons were used take out a nest or an incoming batch of LEPS.
The laser weapons tore them apart.
Holy shit, did they tear them apart.
When Billy came up with the prototype, Johnny and Jack managed to capture two dozen LEPS, by rendering them unconscious.
Billy experimented on them.
Hell, Billy got credit for over four hundred LEP kills before the weapon was issued for use.
I loved it. I loved that day.
I had watched him test the laser before.
The earlier weapons cut into the skin of the LEP and although it was enjoyable to watch, it drained a lot of the lasers power to finally kill the LEP.
Don’t get me wrong, it did work and the LEP were injured and didn’t attack any further.
But they worked on energy cartridges. They were expensive to make and held only ten shots.
Anything bigger was a danger to the shooter, and too heavy.
So Billy had to work on that.
Finally he did it.
I had heard it before. He had it. He had it. So I was less than enthusiastic when he called to say he had it.
Billy was sick and twisted and reminded me every bit of both of the men who raised him.
There was a chamber. I saw the blood on the walls, but that wasn’t unusual.
The chamber was padded, square and about twenty-five feet long.
The observation room was above the chamber. I had been there many times positioned behind the protective walls. There was a weapons port in the glass. Billy would place the laser weapon there, ask for the release of the LEP, and then fire from behind the protective wall.
On that particular day, Billy had the weapon in his hands.
“What are you doing, Bill?” I asked.
“I’ll be back.” Billy walked to the door.
“Bill … wait.”
Before I could say anything else, he left. What was he doing? Then I saw him go into the chamber.
Was he insane? Twenty-five feet was nothing. Especially for a waiting LEP. They would lunge and Billy probably might only have three seconds at the most.
A second for the door to lift, a second for his presence to register with the LEP, and a second for it to get to him.
I pressed the intercom. “Billy, what the fuck are you doing?”
Billy waved out his hand as if to say don’t worry.
He waved me off?
Worry? I was scared to death.
Yeah, this forty-year-old man was the best mind that we had, but he was also like family.
My heart beat so hard, I feared my aged pumper would stop.
Billy placed on a headset. “Test, one.. two.” He spoke through the speaker. “Am I coming in?’
“Roger that, Doctor Hayes.” Another man said.
Billy raised his weapon.
My hands went to the glass. I begged in my mind. Please don’t. Please don’t.
Billy instructed, “Lift the door.”
Here it was.
Three seconds.
Thump. Thump. My heart pounded.
One second …the door lifted.
Two seconds… the beast eyed Billy.
Three seconds … it lunged.
A mighty growl rang out as it lunged.
Fire!
One shot, dead center of its chest, ripped the torso in two.
Billy shouted. “Holy Fuck! Did you see that?” He grinned. “Uncle Dan, did you see that? Was that fucking beautiful or what?”
A few more ‘who hoo’s’ and self celebration squeals and cheers, and Billy gloated in his own inventive glory.
The look upon his face was one I’d never forget.
The feel of that moment was also one I’d never forget. Billy felt Victory, I felt, for the first time in a long time … hope.
26.
Against the Odds
It took a year to manufacture enough laser weapons and pulses, along with cartridges, to arm out elite LEP forces.
We didn’t have many that were classified as Elites, but enough for Johnny’s plan.
We still had access to working satellites, one was close to a hundred years old but the images told us where the LEPS lived.
It was easy. They killed everything and moved on. Like Locusts.
They were always down south.
Finally we had an offensive plan.
Johnny estimated our ammunition and how we to hit their camps.
Just north of Savannah was probably one of the biggest LEP communities. Johnny wanted to hit that one. They had been successful with four smaller ones.
In protective suits, unable to be detected, we sent in spies and saw the nest.
We estimated there were two thousand LEPS and we were sending in twenty men.
Twenty men equipped with Billy’s weaponry.
Of course, Jack Slagel was second in command for the raid.
From the control station, we were able to monitor the entire hit and raid. We did this via headgear cameras, suit vitals signs, and headset monitoring.
It was as if we were a part of it.
“Jesus Christ,” Billy whispered out, looking over the satellite images laid upon the table.
“What?” I asked, my concentration was on the raid that was imminent.
“Did you look at these?”
With a huh, I turned my head. “Um, yeah, Billy, that’s why we’re doing this.”
“No, Uncle Dan, look at these images.”
I did.
I looked but still didn’t pick up on what Billy was hinting at.
His hand smoothed across the topography of the Eastern U.S.
His expression dropped. “I never really looked. Look what happened to our beautiful green world.”
I finally looked. Good Lord, he was right.
Gray areas were destroyed. And everywhere seemed brown.
Billy looked at him. “If we don’t destroy them, Dan, they’ll destroy us. And the sad part is, the LEP aren’t doing this to our world. We are. We are burning out everything just to burn them.”
He was right.
The LEP needed trees. They needed foliage. They hid there.
We burned them, flattened them, and made it impossible for things to grow again.
The LEP only moved like locusts because they migrated to greener pastures.
It was at that moment, when I pondered again if perhaps maybe Man was meant to be extinct.
“This has to work,” Billy said. “We have to get a grip on them.”
He called the weapon the Hitler.
The Hitler was set in motion to perform genocide on a species that was no more than an abomination that we had created.
It was exciting, even more so on this raid, because it was also large.
Five of us monitored it. I didn’t have to be there, but I wanted to be there.
Twenty monitors lined a wall, each measuring eight by eight inches. Underneath each monitor was the name of the person and their vitals.
You could tell Johnny was not a young man any more. His voice gave that away.
But for fifty-two he was strong and fit, following the path his father Frank had followed. Fighting every battle.
Jack loved his father.
That was evident by the jump in his heart rate when Johnny spoke of him.
Their headset conversations were coming through the speakers. We saw Johnny in all of the monitors but his own as he lined up his men and was speaking to them.
Through Johnny we saw the soldiers. The Elite. Not a single one of them looked scared. They looked determined.
We ran a check on all their vitals, radios and so forth.
Billy used the 'all call' feature to speak to them. “Gent
lemen, remember you have ten charges. Use them before you use the pulse. Each pulse should take out three to four LEPS if needed. Also, remember to use the SD if you get into a bad situation. Switch to SD, drop the weapon and run. It will explode the remaining charges and the pulse. You have three seconds to get clear.”
A round of Rogers rang out.
Billy sat back and wiped his brow. He was just as bad on the first wave.
We listened.
“Jack, you take team one to the back area,” Johnny instructed. “They’re sleeping there now. On my call, open fire on them.”
“Estimate?” Jack asked.
“One seventy five.” Johnny replied. “Davidson, take team two and three to the east sleeping area. That’s a big one. On my call, open fire, then pulse.”
“Roger that.”
“Michaels, team three guards. Twenty of them on the perimeters and walls. Each of you position yourself for four each.”
“Roger.”
“I’ll take team four, we’re hitting the nesting and the big rest area. We’ll coordinate like last time gentlemen.”
“Roger that.”
I was proud. I swiped a finger over my top lip, rocking back, feeling somewhat arrogant and confident.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so confident.
“Sarge, something’s wrong,” Davidson spoke. “I don’t have anywhere near a hundred sleeping.”
“Me either,” Added Jack.
“Roger on that one, here,” Michaels said.
Then I heard a ghost of the past ring out.
The graveled, “fuck me,” from Johnny. “Intel fucked somewhere or these things moved. I got way too many in stasis to take out with one team.”
I saw it. I couldn’t’ believe what I was witnessing through the monitors of Johnny and his team.
The nest was on the side of a huge building, but instead of the two hundred we had predicted, it seemed that almost every LEP was there protecting the nest.
Billy cut in, “Hey John, if you coordinate the pulses, you can hit them and take them out. You’re gonna need one just for the nest.”
“Got it, Bill. All teams listen up, change of plan. Three from each team meet me out front. STAT. We’ll coordinate … fuck!”
I saw it too, so did Billy and everyone else in the control room.
Black Parade (Beginnings Series Book 24) Page 11