Earth Shout: Book 3 in the Earth Song Series

by Nick Cook

  ‘Bloody hell, we haven’t got long left to make our move,’ Mike said.

  ‘We can’t do anything until they finish stabilising him, otherwise we’ll blow whatever chance of survival that alien has,’ Jack said.

  We watched in silence as the medical team placed a transparent gel pad over the hole they’d drilled in the Grey’s skull. They gently moved him into the sarcophagus and began hooking him up to its internal monitoring equipment. At last, with a hydraulic hiss, the barometric chamber’s lid was lowered into place.

  ‘Let’s get the subject outside ready for air transport back to base,’ the bald man said.

  ‘Right, this is our moment,’ I said as I unholstered my LRS, my fingers merging with the stock, the pistol quite literally becoming an extension of me.

  Mike’s tranquilliser pistol was in his hand. ‘Just remember our agreement outside and let me deal with the medical team.’

  ‘OK, but do it as quickly as you can,’ I said. I held the Empyrean Key up in my left hand, my LRS ready in the other. ‘On my mark – three, two, one…’ I selected the particle icon and rotated the orb forward. The world of shimmering energy steadied around us and grew solid again.

  A medical nurse carrying a tray of instruments saw us as we materialised out of thin air and her tray crashed to the ground.

  As everyone began to turn, Mike aimed his tranquilliser gun without hesitating and fired it straight at her. The nurse crumpled as Jack and I aimed our pistols at the others gathered round the sarcophagus.

  I gestured towards the bald man. ‘This is going to end one of two ways. The first and our preferred option is that my friend here shoots you all with his tranquilliser gun and you have a nice long sleep. The alternative –’ I waved my LRS at them – ‘will not be pleasant.’

  ‘And please, don’t do anything stupid like trying to raise the alarm, as that will force our hand,’ Jack added.

  Everyone stared at us, but they were all nodding. If they knew how my insides were doing a reasonable impression of jelly they might not have been so intimidated. In some ways this was worse than dealing with soldiers – this was a medical team trying to make a difference. And despite our noble motives, it was hard not to feel like the bad guys right now.

  That feeling only increased as Mike began shooting them one by one. With small gasps they each fell to the ground like the nurse. Finally Mike turned his attention to the bald guy as he reloaded for the final shot.

  The surgeon held up his hands higher. ‘Please, you don’t know what you’re doing. We’re trying to save that alien’s life.’

  ‘That’s as maybe, but it’s what your bosses will do next that worries me,’ I replied. I nodded to Mike and he fired the last dart into the man’s arm. A moment later he too lay motionless alongside the others.

  ‘Delta squadron will arrive in one minute,’ the amplified voice called from outside.

  ‘Right, time to make ourselves scarce,’ I said.

  We headed to the sarcophagus. The Grey’s face was visible through the glass hatch, his eyes closed. Mike bent down and pressed the button on the gravity ring attached to the chamber. At once it glowed blue.

  ‘Guys, you’re about to get company!’ Ruby said over the earbud link. ‘Alvarez and a group of soldiers are on their way to you right now.’

  ‘Then we need covering fire immediately, starting with the two guards outside this tent!’ I told her.

  ‘I’m all over it, boss,’ Ruby said.

  Shouts and cries suddenly erupted from outside as we heard the hiss of sniper rounds. Soon the sound of return weapon fire started up.

  ‘Shit, talk about stirring up a damned hornets’ nest, I just missed Alvarez who is about to give you a house call,’ Ruby muttered over the link.

  ‘Thanks for the heads up,’ I replied. I struck my tuning fork and the icons shimmered into existence. I selected the waveform icon, but just as I was about to activate it, Alvarez and six other soldiers charged in, throwing our plan into tatters.

  His gaze instantly locked on to my face, his eyes widening in recognition. ‘You!’ His pistol was already pivoting towards me.

  Someone grabbed hold of my shoulders as a spark of light came from the pistol’s muzzle. I was shoved hard and spun away and someone cried out in pain. Jack yelled and sprayed bullets at Alvarez and his men. They retreated through the flap, returning fire as they went.

  My heart leapt to my throat as I spun round and saw Mike clutching his leg and writhing on the ground.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I barely registered the siren screaming outside the tent or the building wail of the storm.

  Mike’s eyes stared into mine. ‘Sorry, it seems I just managed to break this mission’s winning streak by getting myself shot.’

  ‘Only by taking a bloody bullet meant for Lauren,’ Jack said, his tone strained as he continued to fire rounds out through the canvas walls towards the shadowy shapes outside.

  ‘You did what?’ I said as I looked away to return fire too.

  He managed a faint chuckle. ‘I didn’t really think it through. But, hey, those are the breaks.’

  My heart wanted to burst. This man, my friend, had risked his life to save mine. ‘I don’t know whether to throttle or hug you.’

  ‘I’ll settle for a hug later.’ He clenched his teeth as a spasm went through him. ‘Oh hell, that hurts.’ He pressed his hand over his leg and blood bubbled up between his fingers.

  ‘Just hang in there, buddy; I’ve got you covered,’ Jack said.

  I emptied the clip in my LRS through the tent wall, trying to buy Jack time. Jack yanked out a medical pack from his rucksack, along with a length of rubber tubing, some glue and bandages. He tied the rubber tube round Mike’s thigh and pulled it hard.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuckity, fuck!’ Mike squeezed out the words between his teeth as he clamped his jaw together.

  I held his hand as Jack set to work, reloading my LRS with my free hand. ‘How bad is it, Jack?’ I asked, as more incoming rounds peppered the canvas and we took cover behind racks of medical equipment that sparked as they were hit.

  ‘It looks as if the bullet has shattered Mike’s knee. I’ll do my best to slow the blood loss, but there’s no exit wound. I need to get him to the operating theatre in E8 as quickly as possible to remove the bullet, otherwise…’ Jack raised his eyebrows at me as he squirted the glue into Mike’s wound and clamped the broken flesh together with his fingers.

  Every muscle in Mike’s face stood out as he jammed his jaw together even harder.

  ‘That’s it – I’m done for now, but we need to get him over to E8.’

  ‘Lucy, prep the operating theatre, Mike’s been injured,’ I said.

  ‘I heard. Hang in there, Mike.’

  ‘I’m doing my best,’ he replied as Jack worked as quickly as he could to wrap the wound with a bandage.

  ‘I’ll take off and get as close as I can…’ Lucy said. ‘Oh, damn it! Three TR-3Bs have just turned up and are directly over your position. There’s no way for me to get close enough to be able to transfer you over to E8.’

  ‘That is not what I wanted to hear,’ Jack said, throwing me a tense look that I knew was matched by my own.

  The gunfire from outside suddenly went eerily quiet.

  Then we heard Alvarez’s voice. ‘Lauren and team, you may as well make things easy on yourselves and give up now.’

  My mind raced. Mike needed treatment and he needed it now. ‘Lucy, we need to come to you if you can’t get to us. I can still get us into the twilight zone. They can’t touch us there.’

  ‘OK, if you can get within a few hundred metres of me, I can whisk you all over to E8.’

  ‘Understood.’ A plan was starting to form in my head. ‘Ruby, how many soldiers are outside the medical tent with Alvarez right now?’

  ‘About twelve. It was twenty, but I thinned them out a bit for you. The rest are hunkered down in ditches and I can’t take them out from here. You should also kno
w they appear to be preparing for a direct assault on your position, with another couple of squads being kept back for the moment. I’ll be able to take a few out when they show their heads, but I won’t be able to stop all of them.’

  ‘Got it.’ I turned to Jack. ‘We haven’t got long. In the twilight zone, invisible or not, we still can’t actually walk through them, especially if we’re going to be bringing our alien buddy with us.’

  ‘Then we need to create a distraction long enough for us to get away,’ Jack said. ‘Check my bag.’

  I opened it and peered in. There were six grenades inside. ‘Oh, now you’re talking.’ I pulled out two of the flashbangs. ‘Right, we need to fall back to the other side of the sarcophagus so we can use it as cover from the flashbang grenade blast. When they attack I’ll use the grenades to stun them. Then I’ll shift us into the twilight zone and we can get back to Lucy before they realise what we’ve done.’

  ‘You can seriously think on your feet, Lauren,’ Mike said through gritted teeth.

  ‘It seems to be one of my skills,’ I replied.

  Jack gave Mike a shot of adrenaline as more incoming rounds ricocheted off the medical equipment. Keeping our heads down, we carefully manoeuvred him, his face twisting in agony, to the far side of the metal chamber.

  ‘Guys, heads up, they’re starting to make their move,’ Ruby said. ‘One of the soldiers has just run up to the entrance…damn, I missed the bastard!’

  Jack grabbed one of the flashbangs. ‘Get ready!’

  With adrenaline thundering through my system, I grabbed a flashbang too, as well as Mike’s dart gun, which I stuck into the waistband of my jeans.

  At the same time something was thrown through the tent entrance and clanged the other side of the sarcophagus. An impossibly loud bang numbed my hearing to silence as a blaze of light erupted, turning my vision white.

  ‘The second assault team is coming round the back,’ Ruby’s voice said, a faint echo in my ringing ears.

  My head spun, nausea rising through me, but my vision had started to clear. I turned to see a black hunting-style knife slicing up through the canvas walls.

  Jack swayed, steadying himself against the sarcophagus, and threw his flashbang through the slit.

  But I knew we weren’t out of the woods yet. The other team would be coming through the main entrance at any second. I pulled the pin of my own flashbang and lobbed the grenade back over the sarcophagus. Jack threw himself over me as two more balls of white light exploded.

  The world spun faster as the nausea tightened its grip. I felt a prick in my arm and heat shot through me.

  My eyes came back into focus to see Jack’s face close to mine, blood streaming from his ears. ‘I’ve just given you an adrenaline shot,’ he said, his voice muffled. ‘Alvarez had the same damned idea we did and lobbed a flashbang in here. Mike’s out cold, but that’s probably not a bad thing.’

  The ringing in my ears began to subside as Jack peered cautiously over the sarcophagus and then stood up, holding a hand out for me.

  I took it and let Jack haul me to my feet. The first thing I saw was Alvarez and three soldiers groaning as they lay outside the entrance to the tent. That scene was repeated through the slit in the canvas near us: another three soldiers were lying on the ground almost exactly where Jack’s flashbang had gone off.

  ‘Guys, great work,’ Ruby said, ‘but I hate to break it to you, those other squads are making their move and will be on top of you any moment.’

  Jack bent down, hooked his arms under Mike and laid him on the closed sarcophagus. ‘We can move faster like this,’ he said, reading the questions in my eyes.

  ‘Good thinking,’ I said. ‘Lucy, operate carrier tone now!’

  ‘On it…’

  A faint chiming sound came from my earbud as I grabbed the Empyrean Key, selected the waveform icon and activated it. The world blurred to the alternative ghostly version I was coming to know so well.

  My hands sank halfway through the handle at the front of the sarcophagus as Jack placed himself at the rear. That was one of strange side effects of being in the twilight zone. The waveform version of the particles that made up our bodies still partly interacted with other objects. Thankfully that included the ground, which stopped us sinking through it to the core of the planet. But there was also an area of overlap where we partially merged with the world around us, like now.

  Ignoring the tingle of energy in my fingertips where they had disappeared a few millimetres into the metal surface, and with the antigravity plate taking the strain, we lifted the sarcophagus easily, Mike balanced on top.

  My head was still woozy from the blast and I stumbled, but we managed to carry the sarcophagus out through the cut slit in the tent’s wall.

  The scene that met our eyes outside was chaotic.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Steel-rod rain slammed down to the ground, forming vast puddles in the wheel tracks that criss-crossed the chewed-up lawn. Together with all the bodies strewn everywhere, it was almost like walking into a movie scene of the Battle of the Somme.

  A line of soldiers had hunkered down on the shoreline and were shooting tracer fire across the lake into the woods where Ruby had hidden herself. Another squad was racing towards the medical tent as a hiss sliced through the air. The head of a soldier with a sub-machine gun exploded in a shower of brains and blood as a bullet hit his skull. He toppled backwards as the soldiers around him dived to the ground.

  An animal instinct drew my eyes skywards. Three triangular craft, TR-3B Astras, were hovering about a hundred metres above us in perfect silence. Rain swirled round them, but rather than striking their metal surfaces the water formed the blurring outline of a bubble a metre or so out, like an invisible force field. It had to be something to do with their gravity-disruption drives. Their propulsion-engine ports glowed orange like demonic eyes peering down at us. I felt numb to my core, like prey frozen by their stare.

  Jack followed my gaze and stared up at the craft. ‘We could do without that.’ Then he looked back to all the soldiers hunkered down between us and the lake. ‘How are we going to get to Lucy?’

  It was a good question. Although Alvarez’s soldiers couldn’t see or hurt us now, there were simply too many of them to slip between.

  ‘We’ll need to rendezvous with her somewhere else. This alien needs urgent attention and fast.’

  Jack nodded. ‘Lucy, any suggestions of which way to head?’

  ‘There’s a road leading away from the house that appears clear according to my sensors. There’s a large open field about two nautical miles from your position. Get there and I can circle round to rendezvous with you. I should be able to keep you in range so you can stay in the twilight zone. Fortunately, that needs a lot less power than bringing you over to E8, which I have to do at much closer proximity.’

  ‘Then we’ll make our way to the rendezvous point now.’ An awful thought slammed into my mind. ‘Shit, what about you, Ruby?’

  ‘Don’t worry about me, boss. I can make my way out of here—’ A crack of automatic fire hissed in the background. ‘Fuck! That was way too close for comfort. Time for me to move again – they’re zeroing in on my current position.’

  ‘Try to keep them busy for another few minutes and then fall back to Lucy and the X101,’ I said.

  ‘Understood, boss,’ she replied.

  We began to tow the sarcophagus, Mike still unconscious on top of it, away from the firefight and in the direction of the main gate set into a low boundary wall ahead of us. Through the heavy curtains of swirling rain I began to make out the outlines of the two guards and a Humvee behind the gate.

  Jack and I froze as a humming sound grew louder and one of the three TR-3Bs started to descend.

  Jack cast me a wild look and for a terrible moment I thought we’d been spotted. I braced myself for the impossible firepower that the craft would unleash on us even if they couldn’t actually hurt us in the twilight zone. But then its landin
g legs began to extend. As it drew lower, I noticed the single red-painted panel in the belly of the craft.

  ‘I’m pretty certain that’s the TR-3B that pursued Ariel,’ I said.

  ‘The one that didn’t open fire on you?’ Jack asked.

  ‘The very same.’

  We watched it eerily descending, its soft humming growing louder over the crackle of gunfire as it landed next to the crashed Tic Tac.

  Then Jack pointed upwards. ‘Hey, where are his two buddies going?’

  I glanced up to see the other two craft peeling away as they flew silently to a floating position over the lake. Searchlight beams suddenly lanced out from both, the cones of light swinging back and forth over the forested slopes opposite Ruby’s position.

  ‘OK, I think those TR-3Bs are searching for me,’ Ruby said over the comm link, her voice completely calm as if this happened every day. ‘I’ll hopefully keep them distracted long enough for you guys to get away.’

  ‘But you need to get moving now too,’ I told her.

  ‘Don’t you worry about me, boss. I’ll be long gone before they finally work out where I am.’

  ‘Make sure you bloody are.’

  A whirring sound came from the landed Astra as a ramp lowered from its belly and two pilots in blue flight suits walked down it. They shook the hands of one of the men in coveralls waiting for them. Two more men moved beneath the TR-3B as small hatches opened in the craft allowing cables with hooks to be lowered. The men took hold of the cables and carried them towards the Tic Tac, trailing lines over the lawn.

  ‘So that’s how they’re going to get the UFO out of here – an airlift,’ Jack said.

  ‘It certainly looks that way,’ I replied.

  Still hidden in the twilight zone, we manoeuvred the sarcophagus over the lawn towards the armed guards at the gate. It was all going so well when Lucy’s voice spoke through my earbud again.

  ‘Oh damn!’ she said. ‘Those bloody TR-3Bs looking for Ruby are almost on top of me.’