Destiny was no stranger to using nature as her restroom, but she was planning to find one of those big red buses to do her business. Or maybe she’d walk onto one of those plane wrecks so she could have a proper sit-down. Scanning the endless piles of trash, she located a few pump-out portable toilets, though she cringed at the thought of how many times they’d been shaken from the inside as they tumbled across the ocean.
A minute later, the captain appeared again.
Tim stood a meter or two from the body, but he walked toward Barlow. “Hey, Captain, we—”
He stopped abruptly when his leg dropped into a shallow hole. His foot and ankle disappeared in the sand.
“Well, this absolutely sucks,” Tim complained.
A second later, his body went rigid as if he were being electrocuted, then he belted out a scream that was probably heard on the Majestic.
He growled in pain as he crouched over his sunken foot, but he started falling backward. “Fucking hurts!” he said on the way down.
Tim used his elbows to catch himself in the sand, but his eyes widened to moons when he saw what had come out of the hole. Blood and bone stuck out from the bottom of his leg where a second ago he’d had jeans and a shoe.
“What’s happening?” Barlow yelled as he approached.
Tim scrambled toward the water, but he put his left hand in another hole.
“Oh, my God, help me!” Tim pleaded.
“Fuck all, just stop moving!” Destiny screamed.
Bert took a few more steps toward Tim, intending to help until he saw the crewman pull the remains of a bloody arm out of the sand.
Tim’s screams went nuclear, as did his panic.
Instead of stopping like everyone else, he rolled from side to side like he was doing a fire drill.
Destiny looked around, taking a moment to study the larger picture. When animals got injured in the wild, they tended to go quiet since the sound of being wounded was an ecosystem-wide call to a buffet.
The fallen man showed no sign of shutting up.
She didn’t even have a band-aid, much less a kit that could help him.
While she furiously thought about what to do, a snake-like appendage came out of the hole where Tim’s leg had gone. It was covered in black sand, with a ring of sharp teeth around the hole at the end. The skin was dark and leathery, not unlike the beached super-whale. When it got half a meter above the sand, it seemed to dial in Tim’s location.
“Tim, run!” she yelled.
It took her a second to remember Tim couldn’t go anywhere.
Colorado Springs Fringe
“Connie, get Mac and the rifle in that order!”
Buck slid down the side of his rig while keeping watch where he thought the animal cries were coming from. Connie shuffled around inside the cabin, first coaxing Big Mac to come outside and then falling over their gear to find the rifle Garth had salvaged for him. He felt for his trusty Beretta, which always sat in a holster behind his back. For the first time in a long while, he anticipated shooting was imminent.
The monster roared again.
He thought the sound was tricking him. As he listened, it seemed like the source was ahead of him where the hand waved them in, but a second later, it seemed to come from the other side of the truck.
“Come on, boy!” he called as Mac’s smiling face appeared in the cab’s doorway.
He helped the Golden down. At first, the pup thought there might be play involved, but he quickly caught on to Buck’s anxiety at hearing the strange roars, and he stuck to his dad’s legs like a magnet.
“I’ve got the rifle,” Connie said as she climbed down.
“Nice work.”
His fellow drivers trotted up to Buck’s truck.
“If you guys have weapons, now’s the time,” he advised.
Eve lifted the hem of her shirt enough to reveal an oversized pistol handle hanging out of her jeans. Mel and Sparky already had their pistols in their hands, reinforcing Buck’s impression of them as experienced truckers.
Only Haley was weaponless. Compared to the others, she was eyes-bulging scared as she searched the yards for the source of the low-pitched roars.
Buck figured their best shot at survival was to stick together, hole up in a defensive position, and see what they were dealing with. Since the person in the house had the advantage of heavy walls around them, he wanted to accept their offer to come in.
“There!” He pointed. “Run!”
Everyone took off except for him and Mac.
“Go, you silly dog! Go get Connie. Go get her!” He egged the dog to run away.
Knowing it was fruitless, he patted his hip and took off after the others. That was enough to get the dog moving.
“You’re always going to make things difficult, aren’t you?” he said while searching all around.
As he moved toward the house, the sound waves struck the three-car garage doors from a different angle, and he realized that whatever was roaring was behind them. The echoes made it seem like it was somewhere else.
The small bit of good news put some pep in his boots, and he caught up to the others. They trotted as a group across the driveway of the waving person’s big house.
Someone opened the front door to let his friends in, but Buck was distracted by a shape approaching from his right.
“Oh, shit!”
It looked like a cross between a mountain lion and a saber-toothed tiger. It didn’t have the huge fangs, but the catlike animal was tan and white like a mountain lion, though it was twice as large with a short, stubby tail.
“No!”
The super-lion moved with lightning quickness toward him and Mac. In the split second before the attack, he thought for sure the powerful claws were headed for the Golden’s big rump, so he tried to whip out his gun to protect him. However, a tan flash crossed between him and Big Mac, bounded once off the pavement of the driveway, and crashed into a tall bush at the corner of the house.
Buck continued running while glancing sideways.
The unusual mountain lion pawed through the bush and struck a whitetail fawn that had been hiding in the greenery. He scooped it up with his bladed nails and sealed the deal with a crunching hollow pop of his jaws.
Seconds after the fact, heart racing out of control, Buck reconsidered that the hunter could have been coming for him instead of his pooch. What if it had missed its intended target? Perhaps the deer was its third choice.
More roars heckled them from across the street, rattling the windows of the home. He fought the wobble in his knees as he imagined Death’s scythe had taken a swipe at him. Yet, even as he jumped on the porch to follow the others, an even larger threat taunted him.
The deer-killing mountain lion wasn’t the beast shaking the house.
“Shut the door!” he yelled.
Seventeen
Above Alpha Site
Garth and Lydia stayed low and ran fast, chased by the sounds of gunfire from the guards shooting at the lone bird. He made sure she kept up with him across the gravel aisle between the rows of vehicles, but he let her go first when they went between two semi-trucks parked in the middle row of the lot.
“Wait!” he called once they reached the back of the long container. A second trailer was parked a foot behind the first one, but it faced the opposite direction, the same as the other hundred units in the row. Every trailer was hitched to its semi-tractor as if they were soon to move out or had recently arrived.
“Which way?” she asked.
Looking to his right, the long repeating gap between the endless line of trailers seemed to vanish on the horizon. To his left, the row only went a hundred yards to the side of the lot where they’d arrived.
“We’ll zigzag,” he yelled over the shooting. “Follow me!”
He squeezed between the Mansfield bumper bars hanging off the back of each box trailer but had only gotten about three trucks down when he thought he’d gone far enough. He turned left and dragged Lydia
along a boxy trailer marked with a bread company logo. He’d gotten about halfway down the length of it when a man shouted from behind.
“Stop right there!”
“Oh, crap,” he blurted when he saw the man looking at him through the gap behind them. He was still in the first aisle, which put one truck-length between them, but Garth had hoped to get away before being seen. “Don’t stop.”
Lydia followed him until he was in front of the next truck, which put him in the open aisle between the middle and outer rows of rigs. The guard had started to give chase, but they had a few seconds to decide where to go.
“What should we—” Lydia said with fright.
“This way!” he decided on the fly.
He grabbed her hand and ran in diagonally toward a gold semi and trailer parked on the far side of the lot. If they could get over there before the man came through the opening and saw them, he might not figure out where they’d gone.
The parking lot was gravel, but the rocks were larger than normal and of different sizes, as if the designers had to make do with the crappiest materials when paving the parking area. They made it difficult to run across the open area at full speed. His heel tipped sideways off a rock every third or fourth step.
“Ow!” Lydia cried.
He turned back, aware the man could appear at any second.
Lydia wasn’t prone to exaggerate, he’d learned, so when he saw her limp, he took it seriously.
“You okay?” he asked between breaths.
“Just go!” she ordered.
He’d only slowed a bit, so he oriented on his destination again. They were twenty feet from the gap he’d chosen next to the gold truck. To his relief, Lydia stayed on his tail as he ran between the big tires of two closely parked semis.
“We made it,” he said quietly. “Now all we need to do is get around to the backside of this trailer and disappear.”
“Won’t they find us?”
“Not if we can get into the woods,” he assured her.
It only took a few seconds to reach the back of the trailer. They halted to catch their breath, which gave him a chance to look left and right. The backs of a hundred box trailers formed a line to his right.
“I wonder what’s inside all these things?”
“I’ve never seen anything so amazing, Garth. Our whole wagon train could have put their supplies in your dad’s truck. Now I’m looking at a thousand wagon trains.”
He didn’t have time to appreciate it like she did.
“Let’s move a few trucks down the way. Then we’ll peek under the trailers until we see the guard. Once we know where he is, we can make a run into the woods.” He counted off three trailers, climbed up the back bumper of his target, and held out a hand for Lydia.
“What are we doing?” she asked.
“Getting our feet off the ground. If we can see them under the trailers, they can see us. We’re going to wait for a few more seconds to hopefully get that guy going in a different direction, then we’ll pop down to see if he’s around. If he’s not, we’ll make our move.”
He had it all figured out.
They waited for at least a minute.
Garth got down and peeked under the trailers but didn’t see anything.
“Okay, I think we’re good,” he said as he helped her down. Her grip was firm and strong, but the feel of her skin zapped him with energy. She was worth everything to protect. “Let me be sure.”
He looked under the trailers, desperate to see the man’s legs since that would tell him if they were clear to run for it. “Where the heck is he?” Garth finally whispered.
“I don’t—” she started.
“Don’t move,” a man’s voice said in a thick accent.
Garth spun toward the gap between his and the next trailer. The lone guard stood near the side step of the rig he’d used as his hiding place. The man’s rifle was aimed at him.
“You must think I was born yesterday.” The man spoke in an accent similar to the head guard. “I’ve been watching you from under the trailers this whole time.”
“We don’t want any trouble.” Garth put his hands up. “But we’d rather not be part of whatever you’ve got going on here. We can leave, right? We aren’t being detained.”
His dad had once given him advice about illegal police interactions, which he vaguely recalled. He’d said you had the right to ask the officer who stopped you if you were being detained, and they had to either let you go or cite what law you’d broken. Lawful peace officers couldn’t hold you at their whim.
It was unclear if the same rules applied to soldiers.
The man licked his lips. His dark camouflage uniform seemed to suck up the light in the narrow space, creating the illusion of a black hole walking toward them.
“Ever since I came from Russia, I was told do this or do that. Watch the people. Walk them for kilometers. Do not talk. For once, I want to do what I want to do. I have kept my eye on you since we started. I hoped to get you alone, but I never dreamed it would be like this.”
“We’ll go back,” Garth said in a reassuring voice.
In one smooth motion, he put himself between Lydia and the leering man.
The guard stopped twenty feet down the trailer, pulled out a handheld radio, and keyed it. “This is Petrov. I found our runaways. The boy tried to attack me, and I had to shoot him. The girl looks hurt but okay. I bring her to you soon.”
He held the radio so they could hear it.
“Good work,” the guard leader’s voice replied. “Do you need any help?”
“Nyet.” The man chuckled. “I know exactly where you guys are.”
“Help!” Garth cried, hoping to be heard on the radio.
“Good try,” the dark man commended.
He held the radio out for Garth to hear the silence.
“Too bad you were a little late,” he mocked.
While the guy put the radio on his belt, Garth took a deep breath, knowing what he had to do. “Well, I know you came all this way to party with me, Garth-Freaking-Meadows, but how about you let the girl go?”
The man acted as if Garth had kicked him in the nuts.
“Idiot! I only talk about her.” He roughly angled the gun barrel toward Lydia to make his point. “For you, nothing but a bullet.”
The guard’s gun came his way.
He thought of something Sam would say.
“I hear in Russia, the gun shoots you instead of the other way around.” He waited for a three-count, then slapped his knee. “Ba-dum-bump!”
The soldier looked at him like he’d come out of the box broken.
Garth had used his precious extra few seconds to force Lydia back around the corner of the truck. While the guy absorbed his terrible humor, Garth turned his head to face Lydia. A quick dip in her pretty shamrock-colored eyes bolstered his spirits to do the only thing he could.
“Crawl under the trailer when I attack,” he whispered.
“What you say?” the guard asked.
He had to act before it was too late.
“No!” she hissed.
Garth knew she would do as he asked when the time came. She was a fighter.
Like him.
He lunged for the guard.
Lydia scrambled to try to escape.
A shot rang out, much louder than any of the previous blasts near the bird.
It was also a lot closer.
Colorado Springs Fringe
Buck tumbled through the front door on the heels of Connie and Big Mac. Mac’s paws skidded across the tiles of the entryway as he tried to stop himself before hitting Eve. Sparky slammed the door shut the second Buck was inside.
“Thanks,” he said to his friend.
“No problemo,” he replied.
The man who’d waved them over to his house stood at the end of a long hall leading to the back of the house. When he met Buck’s gaze, he shot across the hall and disappeared.
“Wait!” Buck cried, giving chase. “
We only want to talk!”
Buck ran to the corner where the man had been, but he caught himself a split second before exposing himself to the next room. After almost being mauled by a mountain lion, his sense of self-preservation had never been higher.
He pulled out his pistol.
“What’s wrong?” Connie asked from a few feet behind him.
“I saw a guy, but he took off,” he answered.
Buck took a quick peek around the corner, then pulled back. There was no one pointing a gun at him, though it was disturbing to see that the kitchen’s sliding glass door was wide open. If one of those lions came around to the backyard…
“We’re clear,” he called.
He rushed into the kitchen and went to the door, intending to close it. However, he saw the missing homeowner on the green lawn outside as he ran the fifty feet to the neighboring house.
“Where the hell is he going?” he asked.
Connie and the others gathered around him.
“I don’t like this,” Haley said with tremors in her voice. “We’ve got to close all the doors.”
Buck looked past the girl in the summer dress. The kitchen table had been stacked with food, toiletries, and camping equipment, suggesting the occupants had been gathering supplies to go on a trip.
“What the heck is going on here?” he asked, mostly to himself.
“Looks like—” Eve started.
Bullets ripped through the upper wall, sending pieces of drywall onto the table as well as over their heads.
“Get down!” he and Monsignor yelled at the same time.
They all fell to the floor, but the hail of bullets had stopped.
“It’s got to be the Humvee,” Buck suggested. “They didn’t follow us in, did they?”
“Nope,” Connie replied.
“Shit.” Buck looked outside. “We’ve got to follow that guy and ask him what happened here. If nothing else, we’ll get out of the path of these bullets.” He pointed at the pockmarked kitchen wall.
“But what about those animals?” Haley complained. “I didn’t join you guys to get eaten.”
“No one is getting eaten.” He chuckled to prove he wasn’t scared shitless. “We’ve got these.” He pointed at his PX4 Storm and Connie’s AR.
End of Days | Book 5 | Beyond Alpha Page 14