“I’m fine. We need to keep moving.”
Grogginess clouded Beckham’s head, but he did his best to stay alert. Collaborators lurked out there. Variants too.
They crept through the trees and light foliage at the edge of the road. Beckham stopped every now and then to scan the forest with the thermal binos. The monsters could camouflage their bodies and mask their heat signal a little, but the optics were still better than his naked eyes.
Crickets chirped in the underbrush, and the caw of crows echoed through the forests. Beckham searched the darkness for moving shapes, but could hardly see anything. If not for the moon, he would be blind.
For the second time, he tripped and fell to the dirt.
Horn helped him up, and they kept walking. With his head aching, Beckham felt like a drunk. He did his best not to stumble on roots or rocks.
An hour later they made it back to the main road.
They crossed over the intersection to survey the muddy field framing the paved road. A crunching in the distance drew Beckham’s gaze to the woods at the edge of the field.
“If we’re lucky, that was just an animal,” Horn whispered.
“Maybe.” But Beckham didn’t believe in good luck anymore. “Let’s pick up the pace and keep to the shoulder.”
If they encountered any hostiles they could always veer off and find cover, but this way he could run without worrying about falling on his face.
They jogged for half an hour before finally stopping to rest.
Beckham took a sip of water, and listened. He half expected to hear the distant sound of gunfire and explosions, but the night was still as the surface of a frozen lake.
“How far are we now?” Horn asked.
“At least another hour if we keep up this speed,” Beckham said. “Hard to say.”
“I hope my girls don’t know we’re out here.”
“Same with Kate and Javier. Chances are good they think we’re still at the outpost, unless Ruckley got in contact with them.”
“Ruckley probably thinks we’re dead. Hate saying it, but maybe she was right about coming out here.”
“At least we killed some collaborators,” Beckham said. “Four less assholes with explosives to use on the outpost or elsewhere.”
“True… I lit those fuckers up, man. Wish you could have seen it.”
“I wish I could have helped.”
“All that matters is you’re alive.”
Beckham took in more water before pressing onward. The moon climbed higher into the sky, a carpet of white pushing the shadows away.
He was thankful for the brightening glow. If it had been overcast, or even a half moon, they would have had to hunker down for the night.
Fatigue really set in over the next two miles of the journey. Lactic acid built up in Beckham’s muscles, his stomach growled, and his head felt like it was inside a slowly closing vice.
Horn was slowing down too, the heavy machine gun definitely taking a toll.
It was pure luck that Beckham glimpsed the movement of diseased flesh in the woods to their left. Freezing, he watched a group of Variants sneaking through the tree line.
Horn saw them too and went low as he followed Beckham into the ditch on the right side of the road. They ran into the woods until they were safely positioned on the crest of a small hill overlooking the road.
“Did they spot us?” Horn whispered.
Beckham stared into the forest where he had seen the pack of Variants. These creatures weren’t camouflaged and their sallow flesh almost glimmered in the moonlight.
He counted six but when he raised the thermal optics to his eye he saw there were many, many more.
Most were camouflaged after all.
“Holy shit, there’s a small army,” he said.
A hulking figure strode along the smaller beasts. Beckham couldn’t see it well, but knew enough about the Alphas to identify them.
Horn reached out, and Beckham handed the binos over.
“Judas Priest,” Horn mumbled. “There’s got to be more than a hundred and is that a…”
“An Alpha, the new kind, I think. They’re going in for round two tonight.”
“We have to do something,” Horn said, handing the binos back. “Warn LT Niven somehow.”
“How? Even if we open fire we’re too far away. No one will hear our shots.”
“Yeah, but they might hear those,” Horn said, pointing to the pack of explosives Beckham wore.
He considered their options as he looked out with his thermal optics again. The beasts were moving fast, but not as fast as Beckham and Horn could move if they really hauled ass.
All the pain in his skull was nothing compared to imagining what those Variants would do to the outpost if they made it in unannounced. If he and Horn could get ahead of them, maybe they could lay an ambush and take most of them down.
An explosion and fire might also attract attention from the outpost. Hell, maybe Niven would even send a team to figure out what was going on.
Or maybe it’s suicide, Beckham thought.
He explained his idea to Horn, and the big guy agreed.
“Sounds like a Kamikaze mission, but you know I’m always down for some fireworks, boss.”
“Good, then let’s move.”
Beckham followed Horn this time, hoping the bigger man would be better able to carve a path through the woods. Even with Horn ahead, Beckham fell several times. He pushed himself up each time, unwilling to fall behind.
Within fifteen minutes they had put themselves a good distance ahead of the Variant horde. They found another embankment overlooking the road protected by trees. From there, Beckham spotted the perfect place for the ambush: an abandoned van.
He told Horn to plant C4 on the gas tank, set off the car alarm if possible, and then retreat back to a hill where Beckham would be camped out with his rifle.
Once the horde came, they would detonate the C4, toss their grenades, and open fire before retreating to the road toward the outpost.
“It really is full blown Kamikaze mode,” Horn said. He set up his M240 and laid out the belts of ammunition. Then he unslung his rifle, ready to go.
Beckham brought up his thermal binos again to make sure the path was clear.
“Ready when you are.” He patted Horn on the shoulder. “Be careful.”
Horn sprinted down the side of the hill and then bolted for the van. When he got to the road he kept low, but fast.
Beckham continued surveying the area. He still saw nothing nearby but his friend’s heat signature. Horn bent down to setup the C4.
Across the road, in the woods, the Variants were advancing. Horn’s estimate of a little over a hundred seemed about right. Trying to take them all on at once would be difficult. He hoped their explosives would be enough to thin their ranks.
Horn was now at the van’s driver side door and was working on setting off the alarm. The wail sounded a beat later.
An animalistic shriek answered, different than a normal Variant.
This had to be the Alpha.
“Run, Big Horn,” Beckham whispered. He picked up his rifle and pressed the butt against his shoulder as he settled into a prone position. The beasts were on the open road now, their pale, almost translucent skin captured by the rays of moonlight.
They streamed out toward the screaming vehicle. Horn made it back up the hill and got down on his belly. He handed Beckham the C4 detonator and then prepared the grenades.
Beckham waited until the front of the horde had reached the van. Several of the beasts broke the windows and tore at the car’s interior.
“Barbecue time,” Horn whispered.
Beckham clicked the remote, then grabbed his rifle again.
The explosion lifted the van off the ground, metal and glass bursting outward in the fiery blast. Hunks of shrapnel peppered the surrounding Variants that weren’t immediately consumed by the inferno.
Horn raised a hand to shield his face and then sto
od to toss the grenades one at a time. They were close enough that both men hit the dirt again to avoid shrapnel. The explosions rocked the road and the ditch. From his prone position, Beckham glimpsed the mangled beasts cartwheeling and flying into the air.
Body parts thumped back to the ground while Beckham opened fire with his suppressed rifle, picking off the ones that had escaped the flying debris and flames. He worried they would find his position anyway, but the beasts were too disoriented to figure out what was happening.
It wasn’t until the throaty wallop of Horn’s M240 joined the fight that the creatures homed in on their position. Horn raked the weapon back and forth, cutting down the abominations with bursts of gunfire as they scaled the embankment.
“Changing,” Beckham said. He heard the shriek of the Alpha and finally saw the beast lumbering behind a pack of others across the road, beyond the blazing van.
Horn covered both of their firing zones as Beckham reloaded. By the time he brought the rifle back up, the Variants had started to scatter to flank their position and the Alpha had vanished.
“Let’s go,” Horn said.
They left the hill, leaving a surprise behind.
After sliding down the other side of the embankment, Horn led them into the forest. Beckham could hear the snap of joints and shrieking of furious monsters as they closed in. The dying wails of others faded away as Beckham and Horn added distance between them and the battlefield.
The first of the creatures reached their former sniping position a minute later. The fuse on the small chunk of C4 Beckham had left behind went off, detonating the explosive, and erasing more of the monsters.
They ran harder, headed toward the road. A glance over his shoulder and Beckham confirmed the creatures were on the pavement too, running like wild animals on all fours.
He halted and shouldered his rifle, firing off a couple of bursts. Horn did the same thing, taking down five of the beasts. They crumpled in bleeding tangles of limbs and claws.
“Go, go, go!” Beckham shouted.
They ran like that for the next ten minutes, stopping only to take down the creatures drawing too close. But it was the hostiles bolting through the woods on both sides of the road and the missing Alpha that had Beckham worried.
Horn switched back to his M240 to finish off the rest of the ammo while Beckham took a knee by his side and reloaded his M4.
Rounds lanced across the road and into the ditches as dozens of Variants exploded out of the trees toward their position.
Beckham was on magazine three of six now.
Horn’s M240 went dry a few minutes later. He switched to his M4A1 and turned to keep running.
This wasn’t the first time the two men had fought off overwhelming numbers. Back at Fort Bragg they had been down to just their knives as Variants closed in.
As they slowly burned through their ammo, it seemed like they were heading for the same fate.
There were still at least twenty or thirty Variants pursuing and the Alpha still held back. Waiting to make its move.
Beckham turned and ran again, seeing a single light spearing through the dark in the distance. The spotlight glowed like a beacon, but it was still impossibly far.
A high-pitched screech erupted through the chorus of the monsters. The beasts all stopped their pursuit, but Beckham kept firing calculated shots, killing three before they darted away and vanished into the night.
Horn, panting, stepped over to Beckham, pistol in hand.
“Sounds like the Alpha,” he said. “Maybe it’s calling a retreat.”
“Or reorganizing. I don’t want to wait here to find out.”
They fought against the exhaustion choking their muscles, running with all the vigor they could muster until more lights blazed across the road ahead. Horn pulled Beckham to the shoulder out of view as an armada of vehicles sped toward them from Outpost Portland.
“Think those are our friends?” Horn asked.
Beckham squinted, but couldn’t tell. “Don’t want to chance it in case they’re not. Get in the ditch.”
They lunged for cover as the growl of diesel engines grew louder.
The vehicles ground to a halt and a spotlight clicked on, sweeping over the ditch until it hit the two men.
“Fuck,” Horn muttered, holding up his hand to keep the light out of his eyes.
“Get up!” someone yelled. “We know you’re out there.”
Beckham squinted into the beam.
A familiar voice called out. “Captain Beckham, Master Sergeant Horn!”
Beckham started up the side of the ditch with Horn. At the top, Ruckley stood looking down with a scowl.
“You two got more lives than a pack of feral cats,” she said.
Horn laughed and helped Beckham up the ditch. Something shot high above them like missiles. They both spun to look as a rumbling sounded.
“What the…” Beckham began to say.
The scream of fighter jets roared through the night. A second later, explosions boomed in the woods miles away, lighting up the sky in an apocalyptic glow.
They dropped payloads on more targets beyond that, the ground trembling with each impact. The jets came back for a second run, raining more bombs in brilliant explosions.
As the vibrations and noise of the aircraft faded away Ruckley clapped Beckham and then Horn.
“Thanks to you two, we were able to go on the offensive tonight,” she said. “The explosion on the road helped us ID exactly where those Variants were with a drone.”
Horn grinned proudly.
“Thermal vision identified the location of several other hordes, and we called in those F-35s from an aircraft carrier off the coast. If you hadn’t set off those explosives, that drone would still be going around in circles searching all the wrong areas for those things.”
“Glad our crazy plan paid off,” Horn said.
Beckham stared at the flames raging in the distance. He didn’t hear any cries or wails from the beasts. Not even the Alpha had survived.
He wanted to feel the same joy as the others celebrating the victory, but he couldn’t help thinking that, if he was still alive, Timothy might have been in the path of these bombs.
— 9 —
The abandoned cup rolled back and forth on the mess hall deck of the USS George Johnson. White light flooded the space, belying the black night that had settled outside the stealth warship. Kate marched through the mess and scooped up the cup while Carr kept walking.
They had been working in the laboratory almost nonstop. Now that they had an idea of what the webbing in the Variant tunnels was used for, they had changed gears to focus on experiments to uncover the molecular mechanisms by which the webbing worked.
So far, none of it had been helpful in translating the signals passing through the webbing into information that they could interpret and understand.
They had reached an impasse and needed a new revelation. A breakthrough to push them beyond what they already knew. Being confined to that claustrophobic laboratory with a half-dozen technicians working shoulder-to-shoulder had been suffocating Kate’s mind.
Sometimes a brief break from her routine allowed her to think outside of the box. Coffee didn’t hurt, either.
“Back in my MIT lab, I told my graduate students that if they left their lab benches a mess, I would expel them from the program,” Carr said.
Kate deposited the cup in a sink filled with other dirty dishes soaking in soapy water.
“Did you ever have to follow through?” she asked.
Carr let out a chuckle. “No, thankfully they always kept everything clean. I’m pretty sure they assumed I was serious.”
“Were you?” Kate asked.
“Of course not,” Carr said. “But I didn’t mind that they thought I was.”
He reached up to a cabinet and pulled out a tin of coffee. From another drawer, he took out a spoon and scooped a pile of the grounds from the tin into the coffee maker.
“I’m sur
prised they bought that,” Kate said. “It would’ve been an extreme response.”
“Very true. Not to mention replacing a graduate student isn’t easy or cheap when you’re trying to secure new grant funding.”
Kate chuckled at Carr’s dry humor. The man was finally beginning to seem a bit more human around her despite his rough edges. She still didn’t envy any of the former students that had studied under him.
The gurgle of the coffee maker filled the silence between them, along with the aroma of the fresh brew. Once the pot was full, Carr removed it and poured a mug for each of them.
Kate took a cup, closing her eyes and breathing in the aroma.
“Pulling all these long shifts is getting to me,” Kate said. “Pretty soon all the coffee in the world isn’t going to keep me awake.”
“Me, too.” Carr took a sip. “It doesn’t help that we’ve only got access to subpar beans. I miss good coffee. Colombian used to be my favorite.”
“Ethiopian for me.”
“The things we’ve lost…”
“I wish coffee was the least of our worries.”
Kate motioned for him to follow her back to the tables in the mess. They slumped into seats across from each other in the otherwise empty room. A sudden smack of an opening hatch caught their attention.
The lanky form of technician Sean McMaster came through the opening.
“Hey, Sean,” Kate said. “We just brewed some coffee. Would you like some?”
He nodded almost sheepishly, shuffling off to the mess, then joined them at the table with a mug.
“We’ve got caffeine now, and a new location,” she said. “Is it enough yet to inspire any new ideas on how we can tap into the Variant webbing network?”
Sean took a sip, watching them both, but he didn’t reply.
Carr furrowed his brow in concentration, the steam from his coffee swirling up toward his face.
“It might take all day running chromatography and fluorescence spectroscopy tests,” Carr said. “But we’ll identify every single molecule that passes through the webbing.”
“That’ll take a lot of time,” Sean said. “I’m not sure how helpful it’ll be. What do you think, Dr. Lovato?”
Extinction Cycle Dark Age (Book 2): Extinction Inferno Page 10