“Well, you’re right about one thing, Franklin,” he said. “They let us in here for a reason. So they must need something from us.”
Millwood made a display of feeling his breast pockets. “I’m still out of smokes.”
“If they need us, then we have an advantage,” DeVontay said. “Even if we have no idea what it is yet.”
“You humans are so inefficient,” the Conglomerate said. “If you were able to think alike, you wouldn’t have to waste so much time communicating.”
“Hey, at least we aren’t shitting our diapers,” Franklin said. “Without humans to exploit, you’d be laying in a crib somewhere up to your eyeballs in your own stink.”
Kokona’s eyes narrowed, even though the other Zaps remained impassive.
Ah ha. You’re holding out on them, aren’t you? You’re cooking up a special little plot of your own.
“We understand your anger and fear,” the Conglomerate said. “It’s no fun to lose, is it? But sometimes you have to admit defeat so you can grow. That’s why we had to cull our kind, when some of them devolved back to savages. We’ll have to kill them all eventually, but in the meantime, they can be useful in solving other problems.”
“So we’re a problem, huh?” Franklin said. “I’ll bet you starry-eyed sons of bitches are surprised we’ve hung on so long. Thought you could just clap your hands and have us bowing and scraping. You may wipe us out in the end, but you’re sure going to feel a boot or two up your ass along the way.”
“True, you’ve proven more enduring than your frailty suggests. But your extermination is not our primary goal. Your homocentric view of the universe would of course cause you to believe you’re of primary interest to us, but you’re merely another resource to be mined. We’ve already taken most of your ideas and improved upon them.”
“Big talk,” DeVontay said, encouraged by Franklin’s open defiance. “Look what happens when you have a chance to create. You copy from us. You copy our buildings, you copy our language, and then you make copies of what lives in the world around you. Everything you make is fake. You’re damned smart, I’ll give you that, but you sure as hell don’t know how to dream.”
“That’s where you are wrong, DeVontay Jones,” Kokona said. “You’re a slave to reality, but we make reality.”
DeVontay, Millwood, and Franklin suddenly found themselves trapped in a clear cylinder. The strange material slowly compressed around them, pushing them together as it drew into an ever tighter circle.
Kokona laughed, and then the rest of the Conglomerate joined in.
It was the first truly human sound they’d made.
And it scared DeVontay more than anything else this apocalyptic hell had ever rendered.
DeVontay was aware of the raw body odor of the two men as the space grew smaller and pushed them closer together. But before the circle constricted them to the point of shattering bone, a yellow and orange cascade of fire erupted above the ceiling and an explosion caused the world to tremble.
“They’ve arrived,” the Conglomerate said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
High President Abigail Murray was determined not to return to camp without knowing what they were up against.
But she wasn’t completely confident the Blackhawk’s Hellfire missiles could punch through the dome, or if an aerial attack was the best tactic. Even with a strike on a conventional city, the missiles would inflict only minimal damage. The threat of the drone birds was reason enough to be cautious, and no doubt the Zaps had generated powerful new weapons that could knock the chopper out of the sky like a pesky mosquito.
Still, retreating without intel would do little to advance their cause, even though she saw nothing so far that would change her mind about Operation Free Bird. The slaughter of the savage Zaps provided a hollow burst of triumph, but that would soon fade once word spread around the camp about the Zaps’ advanced city, its protective dome, and the evident improvements to its electron harvesting.
So Murray ordered a two-fold mission—the corporal and another soldier would approach the dome using the Humvee while she and the others conducted a probing run with the chopper. The Humvee was likely safer, but she couldn’t allow any sign that she was protecting herself while sending others on a risky mission.
She didn’t like having the two civilians along, but she couldn’t very well leave them out in the ruined city, not with Zaps and bloodthirsty dogs and other creatures roaming the night. The older woman in the fedora, K.C., said four members of their group had attempted to invade the dome on a stealth rescue mission. Private Kelly told Murray about the super-intelligent and cunning Zap infant who was likely in the city.
Field reports of intelligent Zap babies had seemed too far-fetched to believe, but they were so widespread that Murray had come to accept them. Earth Zero leaders had never specifically targeted the babies, since the advanced Zaps operated through communal telepathy and thus were all equally dangerous. The savage Zaps seemed to be immune from the telepathic connection, which fit the prevailing theory that they were regressing while their more sophisticated counterparts were rapidly evolving.
As the chopper approached from the north, a pervasive sense of awe swept over her. It wasn’t just the aesthetically perfect shape of the dome and its sea-blue colors, or the brilliant streaks of stroboscopic lightning that raced along the curved surface. Nor was it the silver buildings cast in stark relief by the descending tubes of plasma. The Blue City seemed to float in a bed of nothingness as if cut adrift in the vastness of space.
Yet the sky above was swathed in multi-colored skeins of aurora, nature’s own version of the Zap’s refined plasma. The sparse clouds were painted rags hanging in a windless November night. A veiled moon contributed its own soft yellow lambency to the show. With the destruction on the planet’s surface hidden in darkness, it was easy to imagine this wasn’t the end but a wondrous new beginning.
But imagination was for children, and leaders had to put away childish things.
“Move in for attack,” she ordered Torgeson.
The light from the controls reflected in the pilot’s aviator shades. His trademark toothpick bobbed up and down in his mouth as he set his jaw and worked the pedals and levers.
The troops behind them were silent, the psychedelic chiaroscuro dappling their young, scared faces.
“What’s the target?” Torgeson asked.
“Center building, the one directly under the top of the dome. Maybe we can get a two-fer and knock out their power supply.”
Or trigger another nuclear reaction.
Murray didn’t fear such a fate. After all, that was the entire strategic end game of Operation Free Bird. But if she didn’t survive to deliver the orders, she wondered if NORAD would follow through on the plans.
Who would assume command if she died? Would NORAD recognize Gen. Alexander as her successor? Her former friend was on board with the plan, having sworn to uphold Directive 18 if all other options failed. But Col. Munger might’ve swayed him with dark whispers of power and control.
She was certain Munger was mad, with stress and fatalism brewing a toxic concoction in his mind. It was only a matter of time until Munger betrayed the general and assumed the throne for himself. His brand of defiant charisma would play well among the frightened, defeated people in Luray Caverns. Munger would seal off the caverns, eliminate any Zaps trapped inside, and then spend humanity’s last days in darkness and isolation.
Directive 18 would bring about the same conclusion, but Murray saw nobility in fighting to the end. Maybe these Hellfires would do little more than dent the enemy, but a full-scale nuclear launch from every remaining superpower would deliver a message.
Even if that message was a suicide note that merely said, “We were here.”
The chopper powered lower and more details of the buildings stood out. She saw no sign of life. Why did the Zaps go to so much effort to imitate a human city and then leave it unpopulated?
But sh
e was sure they were there, the glittery-eyed fiends that were the ultimate Other. The human race had evolved as tribalists, shunning those that were different or unknown, and the Zaps were the ultimate crystallization of that otherness. Because the most horrible thing about them was the shadow of humanity lurking inside them.
They were eighty yards from the dome when Torgeson said, “With manual launch, we can’t count on much accuracy.”
“That’s okay. At least we can let them know we’re here and haven’t surrendered.”
She ordered the troops to take battle positions and shoot anything that moved. They opened the cabin doors and one brave young man belted himself in behind the M60. Over the buffeting wind and the churning rotors, she didn’t hear Torgeson’s exclamation, but the drone birds were easy to spot against the illuminated dome.
They flew in a V formation of seven, arcing up into the aurora as if using the swirling colors as camouflage. The machine gun opened fire, rounds and tracers zipping through the night. The drone birds swooped down in a swan dive, light reflecting off their alloy wings.
“Stay on point,” Murray ordered Torgeson. “Fire when ready.”
The chopper juddered slightly when Torgeson pressed the tiny red button on the end of the pitch control lever. Small arms fire popped and pecked, doing nothing to deter the diving birds. The missile on the left launched with a flooosh, trailing smoke and sparks like bad rain. It cut a slight arc toward the dome, its path askew but destined to hit somewhere near the center of the strange city.
The drone birds changed the direction of their attack from the helicopter to the missile. The soldiers sprayed their M16s at them, and the machine gun spat the last of its belt, but the drone birds maintained formation. One of them tipped and wobbled but kept its flight path. But the missile was faster than the metal bird and it struck the dome just before it was overtaken.
Torgeson whipped the Blackhawk away from the blast zone and descended into the blackened valley, waiting for the detonation. To Murray’s surprise, the missile pierced the dome. The scattered lightning coalesced into a brilliant miniature star around the impact point. The plasma tubes became brighter until they radiated a turquoise pulse that illuminated the entire city.
The birds followed the missile, vanishing into the electrostatic maelstrom, and they didn’t emerge, but the missile did. It plunged into the top of one of the buildings and exploded with a muffled whooompf. A red and yellow blossom of fire swelled from the explosion, bits of flaming debris and shrapnel raining down to the streets. The helicopter shook from the concussion wave, but as the fire died away and black smoke rose to collect beneath the top of the dome, Murray saw that the building was undamaged.
A collective groan of dismay came from the soldiers as they realized how impotent their weaponry was. But Murray wasn’t about to give up.
“Touch down and unload,” she said. “Then make one more pass and try to hit the top of the dome, and then touch back down again. If we can knock out their power source, maybe we can cripple them even if we can’t destroy them.”
“What about what happened in Wilkesboro?” Torgeson shouted over the noise, working the controls as he glanced around to check for more drone birds. “If we trigger another of those nuclear blasts—”
“Then the mission will be successful,” she said. “But if we can at least knock out the power, we can try a ground attack. Set it down as close to the dome as you can get. The Humvee ought to be moving into position already.”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“That’s an order, Lieutenant. You haven’t forgotten Directive Seventeen, have you?”
“Die now, die later, what’s the difference?”
“The difference is we’re humans and they’re Zaps.”
Torgeson spat his toothpick onto the cockpit floor. “You got it.”
The chopper touched down on the scorched earth, and Murray ordered everyone to unload. She climbed out of the cockpit onto the brittle charcoal and ash, the brusque odor of smoke choking the air. She motioned for Torgeson to lift off and assembled the troops as the chopper lifted back into the dazzling night sky.
He could abandon the mission and fly in any direction he chooses. He’s got better odds of surviving than almost any human left alive. But I’m betting he’s got backbone and a little pride. Maybe even cockiness.
Or maybe he’s just another kamikaze maniac like me.
But traditional Japanese kamikaze pilots died alone by deliberately crashing their planes into enemy targets. Murray planned to take the entire human race with her, as well as every living organism on the planet.
“President Murray!” one of the soldiers shouted as the Blackhawk rose several hundred feet. Murray tore her gaze from the chopper and saw the soldiers running toward the headlights of the Humvee not far from their landing site. The soldier waved for her to follow but she was fixated on Torgeson’s decision: Would he fight or would he run?
When he turned the chopper’s nose north and accelerated, Murray’s heart sank. She should’ve ridden shotgun and forced him to comply with order. But she’d never taken her sidearm from its holster. She couldn’t kill one of her own.
I can’t kill one, but I can kill hundreds, or thousands, or however many are left on the Earth. Maybe I’M the coward.
But Torgeson wheeled just before the helicopter vanished into darkness and sped up, gaining altitude as he did so. He must’ve been allowing himself more room to gather speed and zero in on the target from above.
Murray smiled and ran toward the assembled troops. She was proud to be an American, glad to be human. Even if it ended right here, she wouldn’t do anything differently. They fought, and that was enough of an epitaph for the human race.
By the time she reached the group, they were readying for combat, checking their magazines, securing their knives and rucksacks, and sipping water from plastic canteens. She saw the little girl and the older woman in the fedora, as well as the wounded private who’d been in the Humvee. The two women were armed, but the girl held only her cloth doll with its scraggly yarn hair.
Murray thought of Hope, the little girl who’d died in the caverns because Murray failed to adequately protect her people. She wondered if the girl should wait in the Humvee but decided that fate would be much worse in the event the battle was lost. She couldn’t spare anyone to guard the girl and she didn’t want the Humvee driven into the city where it might be stranded.
She’s part of this. She can’t escape our common fate.
Torgeson launched the second missile, aiming for the polar point from which the lightning had previously originated. The electromagnetic energy was still pooled around the original impact point, as if drawn by the atmosphere inside the dome. No drone birds were visible as the missile’s propulsion stream trailed across the coruscating night.
“Get ready to move out!” Murray shouted.
As the missile hit home, the ground shuddered beneath their feet. A brilliant geyser of white sparks spewed up into the night, throwing white light across the entire valley. A plume of smoke curled out like a black flower, the thunderclap of the explosion triggering a shock wave that stirred the still air.
The dome went dark, the city inside it no longer visible.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
In the resulting hush, the only sound was the soft whirring of the Blackhawk’s blades.
No reflection of the aurora. The dome’s gone! We knocked it out!
The Hellfire hadn’t triggered a chain reaction. Much of the force of the blast must have radiated downward, but she was unable to view any damage. But if the dome—whether it had served a defensive or environmental barrier—was no longer operable, then this was the time to strike.
“Let’s go,” Murray commanded, drawing her pistol. As the squadron moved forward, Murray took the girl’s hand. K.C. flanked the girl’s other side. Their eyes met and Murray gave a nod of approval, an unspoken agreement that they would protect their girl w
ith their lives.
“If we see my group, I’m taking them and leaving,” K.C. said. “We didn’t sign up for this war.”
“None of us did,” Murray said, but she declined to invoke Directive 17—mostly because she was pretty sure the woman’s friends were already dead.
The first wave of troops reached the perimeter where the dome had bordered burnt grass. Murray couldn’t see what lay beyond the border but there were vague shapes emerging from the smoke—the buildings still stood against the gloaming. The Hellfire hadn’t delivered a knockout punch after all. If any Zaps resided here, they’d have to be cleared out via street combat.
The Blackhawk hovered near the Humvee, about to touch down as Murray had ordered. But it suddenly took off with a roar of its engines and a frothing churn of its rotors. It flew at low altitude, a searchlight sweeping the blackened ground just below the cockpit. The creek came into view and was gone, and that’s when Murray saw them.
The savage Zaps poured out of the trees, little more than scrawny silhouettes flitting against the chopper’s light. The engine noise covered their hissing, and most of them were barefooted, which allowed them to creep across the charred valley without making much noise.
“The monsters!” the little girl squealed.
A couple of the soldiers bringing up the rear noticed the new threat, but those in the front were already probing the city. The helicopter had no automated means to fire a machine gun, and even if there had been an extra passenger, the M60 was out of ammo. Torgeson was mostly helpless to provide any air cover, even though he swooped the Blackhawk just over their heads to distract them. Still, there were so many of them, and they were intent on reaching the dome.
The Zaps could be attacking from every side. Maybe they were just waiting for their opportunity, and we provided it for them. Or maybe we’re all they want.
Murray and the other troops entered the alloy-ringed base of the city, and Murray discovered the fake landscape and contrived urban design of the architecture. Even with the smoke clearing, the visibility was poor. The buildings gleamed under the hazy light of the aurora and the streets were like shadowed canyons running between them. They could use the canyons as defensive positions, but they also ran the risk of being trapped in them.
Directive 17: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Page 18