Persecution: God's Other Children. Book 2

by Rob Mclean

  The smells of popcorn and hot-dogs wafted up from the fast-foods stalls. Opportunistic sellers were scattered through the car-parks and in the forecourt, busily catering to the insatiable appetites.

  John watched the crowds file peacefully past the merchandising vendors, selling souvenirs of the envoy’s visit to L.A. T-shirts with the triangle of triple ‘six’ shaped galaxies were popular along with flat-caps and bumper stickers. He saw almost every pop-culture image of alien spaceships that had ever appeared in the movies, now plastered on the T-shirts of the crowds. He felt sure his brother Jarred would feet right at home amongst this upsized geek convention.

  A female voice that he didn’t recognise came over the comms unit in John’s ear to announce the imminent arrival of the ‘primary’. He supposed the exact arrival time was either being kept super-secret, or more likely, the envoy’s exact movements weren’t being choreographed by human handlers. John saw the soldiers next to him, who he thought were already active and alert, acknowledge a similar message by becoming even more hypervigilant.

  The people arriving, John saw, were now just a trickle and it looked as if the first part of their job was nearly done. Then, he saw someone point to the sky. Heads looked up and John assumed the envoy’s vessel had been spotted. The dawdling stragglers suddenly found new reserves of energy and surged towards the gates.

  The band, on a stage at the northern end of the stadium, stopped playing midway through their song. The last notes were drowned out by the rising vocal anticipation of the crowd.

  On his iPad, John watched the television coverage of the arrival of the envoy’s lander vessel. It was the same one that had first landed near the pyramids in Egypt all those months ago, but the sight of the alien craft defying the known laws of physics still amazed him. Judging by the roar of nearly ninety thousand voices, it still amazed them too.

  “That’d be our guest,” the sniper said to no-one in particular, as he kept his eye to his scope.

  “Yeah,” John said, offering the vision on his iPad, “it never gets old.”

  “Hmmm,” the spotter grunted without taking his eyes from his binoculars. “You gunna run along now and enjoy the show?”

  “Yeah, in a bit, once everyone’s in.”

  A few moments later, in front of the human dignitaries that included the Mayor of Los Angeles and the new, U.N-delegated State Governor, the envoy landed. The vessel hovered a few inches above the specially built raised platform in the middle of the playing field. Roped off and behind crowd-control security people, there was a no-man’s land to another ring of fences and a perimeter of heavily armed new U.N. soldiers.

  As before, the door of the vessel melted before the appreciative crowd’s eyes to morph into a set of silver steps. A hush fell over the crowd as they collectively held their breaths in anticipation.

  As soon as the envoy’s foot appeared, the crowd erupted in wild cheering. The euphoria ramped up an order of magnitude when the envoy descended the steps and waved to the crowd. He still appeared as a perfected version of a coffee coloured man in his late twenties.

  As in the other cities he had visited, the envoy had donned the traditional dress of the host cities. This time he was dressed in designer jeans, basketball shoes, a flat-cap and a merchandising t-shirt with the triple galaxy in a triangle logo. Complete with bling, oversized gold necklaces and wristbands, he even looked a little gansta. John had to laugh. If the envoy was making a statement about human tribalism, he was succeeding.

  In a very human-like manner, he raised both arms to the crowd, fists pumped and paraded around the stage to the deafening roar of the crowd. Meanwhile, behind him, the lander vessel reformed and lifted from the ground, giving everyone a better view.

  After a seemingly endless rock-star reception, the mayor of Los Angeles called for quiet and formally welcomed the envoy to the City of Angels, the greatest place on Earth. The envoy nodded and waited patiently while the State Governor also welcomed him and made a short speech extolling the virtues of joining the galactic community. John knew, from previous events in other cities, where up to twelve dignitaries had spoken, having only two introductory speeches was mercifully brief. John just hoped that it wouldn’t be taken as a sign of disrespect, but if it was, the envoy maintained a receptive expression.

  The comms in John’s ear came to life. The woman indicated there was some sort of disturbance outside the stadium, on the roadway to the south. As if to confirm this, John saw everyone in the concourse suddenly turn their heads in unison to look back down the road. His comms unit crackled, issuing orders for attention to the southern vehicular approach. The snipers responded by shifting their focus accordingly.

  John peered in that direction, but couldn’t see anything.

  “Got us a gate-crasher,” the spotter said to the sniper. “You see him?”

  “Yar,” the sniper said. “Some big-arsed truck, barging its way up the road.”

  The television networks on his iPad were still showing the envoy. John could still see nothing, but the people on the concourse were moving fast.

  The spotter handed John a second pair of binoculars. “You’ll wanna see this, man,” he said with a grin. “It’ll be good.”

  John peered down the boulevard, but could only see panicked people running from something they could see or hear coming from the south.

  “They first noticed him up under the freeway after he side-scraped a couple of cars on South Arroyo,” said the spotter. He obviously had a different comms feed than John’s.

  “He barrelled up past the Aquatic Center, running into parked cars, but not slowing much,” said the sniper.

  John saw smoke and flames. He figured that was the big noise the late-comers at the gates had heard and were now responding to.

  “They had a L.A.P.D road block just south of Seco, but he rammed through that like it wasn’t there.”

  John could now see the truck coming up the North Arroyo approach. It looked like an armoured truck, the kind he had worked with a few years ago when he first started with BlackSky, except this one had been heavily modified, Mad-Max style. It had a huge grille added at the front that it had used to push through obstacles. Thick metal plates on the sides protected the tyres and a series of thick bars had been welded in front of the darkened windscreen to offer some protection for the driver.

  “How did they drive that through the streets of L.A. without being pulled over by the traffic cops?” John asked. Silently, he wondered if Zeke was behind the wheel?

  “Beats me, but gotta give ‘em points for tryin’” said the spotter, “Hell, there ain’t no way they gonna get through.” He tapped the sniper on the shoulder. “You’re good to go.”

  “Roger that,” the sniper said. His finger tightened on the trigger and after a surprisingly quiet discharge, John saw the windscreen shatter on the passenger side.

  “Damn,” the sniper said. “Wind’s a bit gusty.” It was then John noticed the huge silencer on the end of the sniper rifle. The sniper chambered another round and fired again. This time, the driver’s side windscreen disappeared in a shower of glass. Through the binoculars, John was able to get a look at the driver.

  John couldn’t believe what he saw. Sitting in the driver’s seat, undisturbed by the rain of bullets and with a grim expression on her face, John saw Angela at the wheel.

  Blonde hair swirled about her face, but her hands still gripped the wheel. Behind dark, wrap-around sunglasses, her determination didn’t waver.

  John took his eyes from the binocs. “No way…” he spoke his thoughts out, hoping to make some sense of it all. Had she been playing him all along, just to get some inside information to help her radical religious cause? Surely not, he felt sure there had been more to their relationship than this. He had to call her…

  “What a waste,” said the spotter.

  “Yeah, she’s a hottie,” said the sniper.

  “It can’t be…” John’s pounding heart and shaking hands made it almos
t impossible to hold the binocs still enough to get a good look.

  “A hottie with a very short life expectancy,” said the spotter. Both the soldiers chuckled at the grim joke.

  “No, wait…” John cried.

  “What?” the spotter gave him a derisive look.

  “Something’s not right…” John tried to peer down the binocs, looking for something to back up his gut feeling of wrongness, but the steely resolve he saw in the Christian terrorist hadn’t wavered.

  The spotter shook his head and then to the sniper, he said, “Kill the bitch.”

  “No… wait!”

  His words came too late. The sniper fired for a third time and almost instantly John saw Angela’s head explode before his eyes.

  “Oh God!” he moaned and fell to his knees.

  “What the hell?” said both the spotter and the sniper in unison.

  “There’s no blood,” said the spotter.

  “Yar, roger that,” the sniper said as another round snickered into the chamber.

  John leapt to his feet and stared down the binoculars again. He saw the truck had kept on its path, undisturbed by the loss of the driver. Her headless body still sat upright in the driver’s seat, her hands still clinging to the steering wheel. As the soldiers had said, there was no blood. The entire cabin should have been a gory mess, but there was not a drop to be seen.

  Then John remembered the sex-doll Zeke had bought.

  “Damn, it’s a… a doll,” John said, his voice quavering as relief flooded his heart, “a mannequin.”

  “No shit, man,” said the spotter. As he spoke, the sniper fired another bullet. It landed right in the centre of her chest, flinging the headless doll backwards. Her hands came off the wheel, but the truck kept on course.

  “Ha, told you something wasn’t right.”

  “Yar, but why?” asked the sniper, taking his eyes from the scope to direct his question at John.

  “A decoy.” A memory suddenly popped into John’s head of a time when he had been walking a few steps behind his previous girlfriend, Nat. She was so attractive that everyone only looked at her. With the total lack of attention people gave him in her wake, it was as if she was his cloak of invisibility.

  “Shoot the tyres,” the spotter ordered.

  ‘So if Zeke wanted us to be looking at her,’ John thought, ‘where does he not want us to look?’ But his thoughts kept going back to Angela. The eviscerating, heart shredding moment he had felt when he thought she had been killed had shaken him to his core. Now, buoyed with the knowledge that she wasn’t dead, dizzying euphoria filled his mind. With a newfound clarity of mind, John now saw how important Angela was to him. It had taken the prospect of her death to show him how he truly felt about her.

  He pulled out his phone. He had to call her to tell her how he felt. He didn’t care that he was on duty, or how much her mother interfered in her life. That was all unimportant now.

  As he scrolled down to Angela’s number, John saw Zeke’s magician’s sleight of hand had gained the truck an extra hundred yards or so, but surely it wouldn’t get much further?

  The front left tyre ruptured before his eyes under the sniper’s fire. Instead of grinding on the rims, the truck dropped a little at the front end, but kept going.

  “Shit!” the sniper exclaimed. “It’s got double tyres!”

  “What the hell?” the spotter demanded.

  “The shredded outer tyre is protecting the inner tyre. I can’t get a shot in.”

  “And I bet they’re solid rubber.” The spotter added.

  Now only two hundred yards from the front gate, John saw the Abrams tank in the forecourt turn it’s turret to take aim at the approaching truck.

  In his ear, he heard the comms woman’s voice. “Unauthorized air-borne intrusion. Drones incoming from the western and northern sectors.

  John raced to the other side of his balcony vantage point. In the binocs, his field of view was filled with a dark swarm of hundreds of insectoid individuals. They must have launched from the hills to the west and the golf course to the north some time before the diversionary truck busted through the police road-block. Was this what Zeke wanted us not to see until it was too late? But what could drones do? Even that many of them, what threat could they pose? And who was controlling them?

  As he pondered the drone problem, his call to Angela’s phone connected.

  Barely a moment later, the truck exploded in a shattering blast that knocked him flat.

  The whole building, the southern gate end of the Rose Bowl stadium shook with a deep rumbling. The structure groaned and John felt in his bones as the floor tilted. The southern wall fell away and with it the spotter and the sniper slid helplessly over the edge. Behind them he saw a smoking crater where the truck had been. Black boiling pillars of thick, acrid smoke rose from dozens of overturned burning cars. The vendor stalls had vanished along with the people. All gone.

  The tank was still pointing at where the truck had been, but its gun wasn’t smoking. It hadn’t fired.

  John had a horrible feeling he had just caused the explosion, but he pushed the thought aside for later. He didn’t have time to wonder about that, he found himself scrambling as the floor moved again. He tumbled out onto the stadium walkway.

  Silently, people struggled and clawed at each other as they stampeded their way from the stricken section of the stadium. Mouths moved making unheard shouts of anger, cries of pain and loss. Wordless abuse was flung about before John realized he had been deafened by the truck blast. It gave the whole scene a detached quality. He watched with horror as people turned vicious, fighting for their way to safety. No sacrifice or gentility, just base animal instincts of self-preservation as children wailed and women screamed.

  Overhead, the drone swarm had advanced on the stadium. People either hadn’t noticed or were more distracted by the drama happening in the southern stands. If Zeke had planned all this, John thought, it was with little or no regard for the human cost.

  Above, the envoy’s lander vessel was hovering, still and motionless. Unaffected by the carnage below, it hadn’t moved. John could only hope it would descend. Surely the envoy would be safe inside his miraculous craft? Although what they would think of humanity after all this could not be good.

  Gunfire erupted from around the stadium. Military and police were firing at the drones. Many were hit and fell away, but the sheer numbers ensured that hundreds kept coming.

  As far as John could see, people all around the stadium were stampeding to the exits. The human crush reacted to the gunfire with a renewed surge of mass panic.

  Amid the herd panic, John could see one lone individual standing relatively still, holding his phone out in front of himself. Was he recording the carnage for social media sharing, hoping to cash in on the tragedy? He stood half way around to the western gate, less than a hundred yards away, but John could see the way he was holding his phone was all wrong if he was meant to be filming. Held outstretched, flat with two hands… and he was tilting it… it reminded him of like a games console controller. When he looked to the sky, it confirmed John’s suspicions.

  John called in his observations, but couldn’t hear any response. Either the comms network had been taken down by the blast or some other attack, or his hearing was still too impaired. Either way, he decided to sort it himself. He took off, running as fast as he could manage, pushing his way through the crowds towards the controller.

  Above him he saw the envoy’s vessel start to descend. ‘Finally,’ thought John. ‘What took them so long?’

  He also saw, as he threaded his way through the crowd that the gunfire had thinned out the numbers of drones noticeably. Plastic and metal fragments rained down as more drones exploded under the barrage of automatic fire, but still over half remained.

  The majority of the drones had cleared the stadium walls and were all headed, it seemed, to the podium where the envoy had spoken. Had they been pre-programmed somehow? The location where
the envoy had been scheduled to speak had been known long beforehand. G.P.S. enabled, smart-phone linked drones acting as guided missiles pre-programmed to converge on a specific spot…

  Running through gaps in the crowd, John was only less than twenty yards from his target. A young guy in his early twenties, wearing a thin cotton hoodie, bearing the triple-six galaxy logo was still unaware of John’s approach. Intent on guiding his drones, his attention was wholly focussed on the sky.

  Less than ten yards away the terrorist, now standing all by himself, tilting and balancing his phone in front of him, now stood out as an obvious anomaly.

  John called out, “Hey.”

  The terrorist turned and John saw a flash of anger and hatred in his eyes. He turned back to his phone, intent on guiding his drones until the very last moment.

  John made ready to tackle the terrorist to the ground, when he saw the man’s chest erupt in a fountain of blood and gristle. He fell to the ground still clutching his phone.

  As John snatched the phone, he saw the terrorist had an official registration tattoo on the back of his right hand. On the screen were a simple set of four arrows. Overhead, the drones kept coming closer to their target. John could see the different sizes and the variety of types now they were a lot nearer. Most were small and light, but occasional larger ones looked to be carrying ominous packages.

  John had no time to figure out how the controller worked or how to turn it off, so he smashed the phone to the ground. Above, a small fleet of the smaller drones, twenty or thirty or more all tumbled simultaneously out of the sky.

  ‘Escorts?’ John wondered. There must be more terrorists controlling the drones scattered about the stadium. Hopefully someone could spot them in time. But what about the bigger drones? Were the smaller ones there to give protection and distraction for the larger ones, the ones carrying, God knows what?

  “Shoot the bigger drones,” John ordered, watching one pass overhead. The package underneath looked to be big enough to be a ten pound bomb.