“Speaking of which, do you want to trade?” Connie held out the rifle.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “The rifle will be easier for you to hit stuff far away.”
She laughed ironically. “I’m not worried about the stuff far away.”
Buck looked at the pistol, then handed it over. On balance, it probably made sense for him to have the long gun. Connie had no business spraying and praying beyond any threats that came right up to her. For those situations, the pistol would be more suitable.
“Follow me,” he said in a low tone. “Stay close.” He made sure each of them had heard him, then he sprang for the sliding door and went outside.
He was breathing hard by the time he’d sprinted across the middle yard between the two homes. There was enough shrubbery and bushes to make him worry about an ambush the whole way, but nothing came out and grabbed him.
When he reached the side door, which the man had left open, he waited for all his people and the pup to come through. He closed it to protect their rears.
“The guy isn’t in this one,” Eve reported. “Sliding door is open, so I think he went through toward the next house again.”
The young trucker was constantly putting herself at the front of the pack, gun in hand. Buck appreciated the help, but he wondered if she was taking chances because she still wore that live camera. There was no way he was going to let her social media concerns overtake his Marine training. The front was where he needed to be.
“Let me go first,” he said as he shoved his way through the home.
Like in the previous place, the kitchen table was stacked with food.
He barely looked at the stash.
“Follow me exactly like before,” he advised as he went out the rear sliding glass door, giving chase to the man a second time.
He ran toward the third home, but there was a huge difference in the backyard. A big gray animal floated in the bean-shaped in-ground swimming pool. A privacy hedge prevented him from getting more than a glimpse, but there was no question it was one animal and a big one.
“Shh!” he hissed to the others.
Claps of machine-gun fire rattled again, but thankfully none of the bullets landed on their location. It was one advantage of moving away from the Army truck.
As expected, the third house also had junk hoarded in the kitchen, including a mix of soup cans neatly stacked from the tabletop to the ceiling, but even that treasure trove couldn’t get his attention away from the behemoth in the swimming pool. It snorted, which shook the back windows in their frames.
He diverted to the family room, where he could stand at the bay window and look out on the backyard. The rise of its back, along with the color of its skin, reminded him of an elephant, although it was far too big and didn’t have the huge ears. But what was it?
“Um, Buck?” Connie called behind him.
“Look.” He didn’t respond to her. “It’s fucking huge!”
“Buck?” Connie said again.
He was consumed with identifying the thing in the water.
More gunshots echoed in the neighborhood as the fifty-cal did its deadly business out on the street.
The animal in the pool rose a few feet, teasing a little more of its body.
“It’s got to be thirty feet long,” he said with unadulterated awe. “It’s as long as the pool. That’s got to be a dinosaur…”
It was likely lying in the water to keep cool. The volume of the animal had displaced most of the contents since the backyard lawn was saturated with runoff.
Buck had to duck when bullets struck metal on the house, then chipped bark on one of the small trees by the pool. Once the string of death was gone, he peeked outside again.
The noises seemed to annoy the swimmer. It started out of the water.
At first, with all the crazy things he’d seen lately, he was sure it was a real-life dinosaur. It was certainly big enough, with the same gray skin dinosaurs always had in the movies. It was only after it fully emerged from the pool, standing as tall as the roof of a house, he knew it was something else.
“Fuck me,” he blurted. “I was expecting a dinosaur, not a giant rhinoceros.”
The animal shook water off its body, dousing the windows of the house.
A man’s voice replied from close by. “It’s definitely not a dino, but once they get that big, I don’t think it really matters what they are.”
He whipped his head to the side. The man he’d been chasing stood at the next window, looking at the pool like he was.
Connie motioned to the guy. “I tried to tell you.”
The twenty-something man didn’t appear to be a threat. He stared through the pane with sadness on his bearded face.
Buck glanced outside again.
A few bullets snapped off the gutter downspout, causing a series of loud metallic clanks that seemed to piss off the mega-rhino. It lifted its head and sniffed the wind, then took off with surprising speed toward the gap between the houses.
Toward the source of the gunfire.
Eighteen
Alpha Site
Faith stood with her back to the emergency exit door while she tried to keep her heart from breaking through her ribs. The malicious cries of those bloodthirsty birds reverberated the metal casing of the door, reminding her how close she’d come to being taken down by the flock.
She’d never been so glad to see the confined space of an everyday stairwell.
There were no guards, either. She assumed that was because they couldn’t post guards at every exit. When she had been in charge, she hadn’t bothered putting guards anywhere but at the most obvious exits. That was mainly because there was little chance of a stranger finding the bunker boxes deep in the woods, but also, there wasn’t enough manpower to cover them all. Instead, she depended on their system of cameras to alert her to intrusions.
She looked up at the red light blinking on the security camera. Was the Silver Bullet maglev operational again? Was a tram full of guards being dispatched to capture her? She didn’t think it was likely since the power had been knocked out. The cameras and the little LED bulbs in the lights ran on backup generators.
She let herself catch her breath, but she didn’t waste a second longer than necessary. Her mission was to find Garth and make sure he was okay, so she ran down the steps two hundred feet into the earth as fast as her shaky legs would allow.
“I need a computer. Then I can look up where they have him,” she said on the way down as a way of organizing her thoughts. After running for her life, her scientific mind needed a little structure. “I’m guessing they’ll be in the auditorium with the others.”
She came out of the stairwell to find a familiar sight.
“What the bloody hell is this?” The lights were on in the gymnasium-sized rectangular chamber, which surprised her. The tracks of the tram line softly hummed with power, which meant at least some of the track was operational again. Someone had come through and set the Little Scraggy car off to the side. The Silver Bullet was gone. That same someone must have repaired the maglev system.
But how was it all powered? That was the million-dollar question.
She walked through the boxes of spare parts that filled a good part of the front area until she stood next to the restored maglev station. The tunnels coming out of each wall contained small crossing gates to prevent people from walking into a tunnel designed for the tram.
Faith continued to the apparatus supporting the supercollider hardware. A metal staircase rose over the top of the tube and its raised platform, but she didn’t want to cross. If she went over those stairs, she’d see the destruction wrought by the bomb that had killed General Smith, and she had no intention of dredging up those memories.
“Do I go right or left?” Left was the direction she’d been expecting to take if the power was off. That was the way to the main tram hub, where she could access a computer or sneak into the larger complex of SNAKE. However, as long as the power was on, sh
e figured there were plenty of computers she could use to track down Garth. In the past, she might have found a working terminal over the stairs in the maintenance area, but the place was gutted after Smith carried the bomb there.
She’d have to go to the next junction by foot, which was a mile away.
“Right it is.”
A few guide lights kicked on in the tunnel, activated by her motion.
She stayed on the near side of the collider and ran.
Past where the silent Four Arrows box sat on the other side of the pipe.
Past where she’d shot Ed in the throat. Was his body still on the ground?
Aware of the cameras and the potential for pursuit, she hustled to the next station with everything she had left. She’d already wasted a lot of time walking the grounds and avoiding those birds by hiding in the forest, and she desperately needed to get word to Buck. Sunset couldn’t be more than an hour or two off.
She arrived at the next station holding her side and gasping for air. Her morning jogs hadn’t prepared her for so much running. She figured she’d run a mile in about seven minutes.
To her relief, there were no guards at the next station either.
She had to hunch over to catch her breath, but she only allowed a few seconds of delay. She walked with her arms over her head to free up her lungs while she fought to resupply on air.
Faith brushed strands of hair out of her eyes as she sat down to the first terminal and entered credentials. Her main profile had no doubt been deactivated by Strauss and her team, but years ago, she’d set up a ghost user account with elevated access in case the government tried to pull something on her.
“No, why would I ever think that?” she mumbled.
She clicked the keyboard with lightning speed.
“Doesn’t look like you kicked out Maria Gallante,” she mused as she discovered her fake username was still active. The IT department was probably in the auditorium with the other people from her organization, so checking inactive users wasn’t high on anyone’s to-do list.
“Let’s see what we can see.”
Her intent was to find the security camera feeds, which she had linked to her account on day one to enable her to watch ongoing experiments as well as the status of the tunnels around the sixty-two-mile loop. Now they were going to help her find Garth.
However, there was already a series of programs running on the main server, which caught her attention. There wasn’t supposed to be anything important running since all her people were in the aforementioned auditorium.
The uplink satellite program cried out to her. She clicked to see what it was all about. The result was better than a gold mine.
“Oh. My. God.” Her jaw fell to her chest.
It was a live satellite feed showing the surface of the Earth from above North America. She only recognized a portion of the continent since almost everything on the edges had been rearranged.
California floated like a state-sized aircraft carrier on its own five hundred miles west of Nevada.
Mexico and Central America were mostly underwater.
The east coast of the US was a bunch of islands.
Florida was gone.
The middle states were all erased, replaced by a huge sea that stretched from the doorstep of SNAKE in Colorado to somewhere in eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. An island chain had formed where Missouri and Arkansas came together.
“This is incredible,” she gushed.
The screen showed beyond California, but it was hard to see what was out there. It looked like a new body of land had formed out in the Pacific, but it might have been a trick of perspective. Was it Japan and China on the horizon? It didn’t seem right to her.
She grabbed a pen and some scratch paper and jotted down what she saw. She paid particular attention to California, knowing Destiny was in that direction, but she also sketched the area around SNAKE and Colorado Springs.
Once she had enough data, she returned to her original mission, which was to study the cameras in SNAKE. She was not going to call it Alpha Site like Strauss did.
She went to the most obvious one first, which was the device inside the auditorium. As expected, her people were still there. It pained her to see everyone looking like they were never going to leave, but a brief flare of joy went up when she spotted her ex near the head of the group. Bob Stafford was hopefully playing the role of helper rather than boat-tipper.
“Keep it together for me,” she said to him on the screen.
Typing fast, she switched to a dozen other cameras she knew by heart.
The collision room.
The main tram station.
The station she’d come from, which remained empty.
After seeing no evidence of the boy in the cameras on her speed dial, Faith clicked to the main list of cameras and was greeted by double the number she’d expected.
“What the hell?”
Most of them were labeled with the prefix “nuke station,” which gave her pause. SNAKE’s power came from the residential coal plants around Denver and eastern Colorado. There were no nuclear plants involved.
Yet, there it was. She clicked to see the camera and took a step back from the screen.
“This can’t be!”
An underground nuclear plant seemed to be part of SNAKE now. A giant building and a cooling tower were nestled in a super-sized chamber that had not been part of her original design. However, she saw the same supercollider tube and maglev rail system as those fifty feet from her. It was in a part of the base she didn’t recognize…
“This can’t be right.”
She clicked a few of the other cameras, and they confirmed her initial impression. SNAKE now had a giant underground cave system that housed at least one big cooling tower for a nuclear reactor.
“Impossible,” she said to the keyboard.
Faith cycled through the cameras and put together a mental map of her position relative to the new section. She’d run the full mile from one station to the next, but there was one more short section of tube before it opened up into what she saw on the screen.
She walked down the next segment of the tunnel in mere seconds. The pipe continued into the open space, along with the tramway track to the right of it.
“Well, fuck-a-doodle-doo. We’ve just entered the Twilight Zone.”
The endless chamber excavated out of the rock was real. Herculean pillars supported the ceiling every hundred yards or so. There were three across and seven or eight going back, which meant the chamber was incredibly large.
And the nuke plant was on the far end.
None of it had been there when she ran SNAKE two days ago. She would probably have noticed them during the twenty inspection tours she’d taken around the sixty-two-mile ring.
With shaking fingers, she pulled out the radio.
“Buck, if you can hear me, we’re in bigger trouble than I ever dreamed. I’m not even talking about your son. I’m talking about all of us.”
Colorado Springs Ruins
Buck didn’t know what to think of the guy, but he wanted to make an ally rather than an enemy. “Hey, I’m Buck. We really weren’t trying to chase you.”
“I go by Cy,” he replied. His name sounded like the word “sigh.”
“Well, Cy, if you don’t mind, we’re going to the front of this house to see where that thing went.” The last thing he wanted was to turn and then get shot in the back. He used their brief conversation to observe how the guy reacted and go from there on the trust meter.
“Be my guest. This isn’t even my house.” He pointed at the table full of foodstuffs and toilet paper. “I’ve been scouting around here to find useful items.”
Buck wanted to spend a good long time looking at supplies he could use, but he had to see where the upsized rhino was going. If it headed for his trucks, he’d have to do something.
They all went to the living room. Buck used nonverbal cues to make sure Sparky came last, so someone would keep a w
atch on the new guy.
“Geeze,” Buck let out as soon as he saw the front yard and street. “We started a war out there.”
The wet giant stood close to their house, dwarfing a Mini Cooper in the driveway. It seemed to be checking out the action elsewhere on the block, which Buck would describe as bedlam.
Another of the giants stood between the two houses on the far side of the street. It wailed its air-raid siren howl, which was answered by the closer one as well as several others out of sight.
A half-dozen deer ran frantically back and forth across the street between the two rhino-things and the Humvee parked three doors down. The machine gunner fired at deer, cougars, and three or four other four-legged animals Buck still hadn’t been able to identify.
While he watched, the gunner zeroed in on the nearby rhino-beast, and the ricochets threw stray bullets all over the garage and the façade of the house.
“Duck!” he yelled as the bullets came in.
He fell on Mac, who seemed confused as to why Buck seemed to be playing and not playing at the same time.
“Stay down, buddy,” he said to soothe his puppy pal.
The targeted animal roared and broke into a run. The bucket-sized hooves pounded the concrete road like four giant taiko drums.
“The gunner pissed it off,” he said as he popped over the bottom edge of the window.
“Is it safe?” Haley asked.
“Not at all,” he said with a desperate chuckle. Still, despite the known danger, he had to see what was going on out there, so he kept watching.
The gray monster went for the Humvee. Buck could only see the helmet of the top-mounted gunner, but he imagined his look of terror as the gun re-oriented on the incoming stampede of one.
He fired a few times, but his obvious fear made him shoot wide almost as much as he landed on the target. Fortunately for Buck and his friends, the missing bullets went up the street rather than into his living room.
“It’s going to strike—” he started.
The animal dropped its head like a linebacker going for a tackle, plowed into the side of the Humvee, and flipped it over like it was made of paper. The gunner flew out of his mount, while those inside went with the rolling vehicle.
End of Days | Book 5 | Beyond Alpha Page 15