DECIMATED (The Nameless Invasion Book 1)

by Sean Shake

  I wrenched open the door. “You okay?”

  “Grandma?” Abigail asked, turning her attention that way now that I was helping her grandfather.

  First Emma, then Hunter, crawled out after me, climbing out of the trench and up onto the road.

  I glanced at them, but both seemed fine. Emma didn’t even seem particularly surprised.

  “Fine,” Gabriel replied, undoing his seatbelt and trying to climb out.

  I helped him out of the car and up onto the road with the others, then hopped back down and went to the passenger side, yanking that door open and helping Mary and Abigail out.

  Mary looked fine, just a little stunned, but Abigail was bleeding a lot from her head. I lifted her hair to look at the wound. Luckily it seemed minor. “Are you okay?”

  “A little dizzy.”

  “Do you remember what happened?”

  “We were in a fucking accident.”

  “What’s my name?”

  “Gage.” She shook her head. “I’m fine.”

  “Is your vision blurry? Headache?”

  “No, just a little dizzy. I’m fine, really.”

  “Let’s hope so.” I looked around for Emma, who was standing on the road. “You’re the nurse, come check her out.”

  “Right,” she said, climbing down. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine.” We had just been in a car crash, after all. I couldn’t expect civilians—even ones who were nurses—to be able to handle these kinds of things like it was nothing.

  I climbed out of the trench and stood next to Hunter. “See anything?”

  She shook her head.

  The trench seemed purposeful, like someone had put it there to set up an ambush.

  But I saw no one charging towards us, no vehicles in the distance come to take our women and supplies.

  The road was empty, the only things nearby being trees and a tall building maybe a half-mile away.

  I looked back down in the ditch.

  Emma had one of the bags Gabriel had overpacked open and a shirt from it wrapped around Abigail’s head to stop the bleeding.

  “At least this seems human-made,” Hunter said, meaning the trench.

  I shook my head. “It’s strange though.”

  “It seems like a trap.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” I spread my arms toward the empty road. “But, no one.”

  “Do you feel him?”

  I concentrated, trying not to call him to me, only to feel if he was close. I didn’t want to put the rest of them in any more danger than I already had. I wouldn’t go after my eyeless adversary until after Abigail found her parents and they were somewhere safe and far away where they wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire.

  “I don’t think he’s nearby,” I said finally. “What about you? Can you… sense them?”

  “I—”

  But her words were cut off by the sound of approaching vehicles.

  46

  The six of us stood in a row as the cars approached us.

  “Don’t attack first this time,” Abigail said scoldingly.

  There were five vehicles in all. Four Jeeps and one pickup truck, the latter having several people riding in the bed.

  Each Jeep looked to have four people in it, plus one in the front of the truck, and another four in the bed. Twenty-one total.

  I didn’t like standing out here like this, and so I walked forward a bit in front of the others, readying my left hand to form a shield if needed.

  But I didn’t see any guns on them, and they certainly didn’t have any pointed at us, if they had them at all.

  Keeping my left hand at the ready I raised my right arm, my hand open. A wave.

  Someone from the back of the truck waved back at me and they slowed and came to a stop fifty feet away from us.

  “Hey there,” a man in the back of the truck called, the one who’d waved at me.

  “Hi,” I replied.

  “We saw you hit the crack. Thought you could maybe use some help.”

  “Yeah, what is this thing? It looks like it was put here.”

  “Yup, it does. Wasn’t us, though. You’re not the first person to crash into it either.” He pointed at a man driving one of the Jeeps. “Kenny there crashed into it just two days ago. Not in that thing, of course. In a different car.”

  “My old truck would have made it over, if my good-for-nothing brother hadn’t stolen it and left me with that stupid Kia,” Kenny replied.

  The man in back of the truck waved this off dismissively. “Then you wouldn’t have found us.” Looking at me, he said, “I’m Mark. What’s your name?”

  I frowned. Mark?

  Could it be the same Mark?

  “My name is Gage. Good to meet you Mark.”

  “Yup.” He looked me up and down. “You a ninja?”

  I chuckled. “Trying to be.”

  Mark smiled. “You and your friends or family there, you need some help? We could tow your car out, though it doesn’t look like it’s in any condition to go anywhere.”

  “That’d be good,” I replied.

  Mark nodded twice then tapped the roof of the truck and hopped out. “Alright boys, let’s get that thing hooked up and out of the ditch.”

  “We should really put some flags in there too,” Kenny said from the Jeep. “So we don’t have to keep rescuing people.”

  “Then what would we do for fun?” Mark replied.

  47

  Twenty minutes later, the Cadillac was hooked up to two Jeeps—one alone had simply spun its tires, unable to get enough grip on the asphalt. Two seemed to do it though, and they backed up, pulling the wrecked Cadillac from the ditch while Gabriel looked on, dismayed. His wife rested her head on his shoulder, an arm around his waist.

  Five other men were standing nearby as well, watching and directing the ones driving.

  Me, Hunter, Emma, and Abigail were standing next to the pickup truck back where it had originally stopped about fifty feet from the trench.

  Mark stood with us, and we watched the show. Everyone else was still in the vehicles, perhaps in case they needed to make a quick retreat.

  “Thanks for the assistance,” I told Mark. I was feeling more relaxed now that they hadn’t tried to ambush us.

  Though really, no one had tried to ambush us except the aliens. People were nicer and more helpful during the apocalypse than I would’ve expected.

  Maybe because we had a common enemy.

  I guess people were always just people.

  “Not a problem,” Mark replied.

  “You know, your voice sounds kind of familiar.”

  I saw smile appear on Mark’s lips. “Yup, I get that sometimes.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a radio station, would you? A pirate radio station?”

  “Oh, that would be illegal. I’d never do anything illegal.”

  “Right, of course.”

  “But if I did have a pirate radio station, hypothetically, I’d wonder how often you listen to it.”

  “Well, hypothetically speaking, I would’ve heard it once, yesterday, as it was the only station broadcasting.”

  “Yup. The bastard’s are going after radio towers. We thought it was just buildings, but it’s radio towers. Anything that can broadcast. They seem to swarm around them.”

  “Radio towers?”

  Mark nodded. “Not sure why. You’d think super-advanced aliens that can hover ships bigger than the tallest skyscraper above New York City without any apparent means of propulsion and resist a tactical nuke strike by the US Air Force would have better means of communicating than radio towers.

  “But it’s like they’re playing capture the flag or something, and all the flags are at radio towers. Because they’re swarming them. They swarmed mine—hypothetically speaking, they would’ve swarmed mine, if I’d had one. Anyway, so now I’m here, still in a high tower, but no radio antenna. At least this way we can see em coming.”

  “How many do y
ou have?” I asked.

  He eyed me.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I said, holding up my hands. “I’m just curious. I mean really, we don’t want any trouble, we couldn’t have planned this,” I said, holding my hand out to the trench and the wrecked Cadillac.

  “I guess that would take a certain kind of crazy devotion to go all in like that. You guys were bookin it when you hit that. Heard the tires screechin and the crash from way up there.” He gestured at the tall building a half-mile away I’d seen earlier. “I’m actually surprised none of you were more injured. I bet Kenny there that at least one you would of eaten it.” After second he added, “Die, I mean.”

  “Yeah, I got that.”

  “I got hurt,” Abigail said.

  “That you did,” he said, looking at the makeshift bandage wrapped around her head.

  The Cadillac made a hideous screeching noise as the nose was pulled over the lip of the trench. After a second, the entire front bumper popped off, and the car jumped back then started rolling toward the Jeeps that had been pulling it.

  The men who had been guiding the Jeep drivers as they pulled the car from the ditch now dove for said car, and together got it stopped before it collided with either of the Jeeps that had rescued it.

  “Well, your car looks wrecked. Do you guys want to come back with us? It’s not a good idea to hang around in the open where they can spot you. They have patrols going out.”

  “Patrols?” I asked, surprised.

  “Yup. They send em out looking for people, then converting the ones they find. That’s why there’s so few of us around. People, I mean.”

  “I figured it was something like that, I just didn’t realize they’d sent patrols out.” I also wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to their base, and not just because I was worried that they were somehow deceiving us—which I actually wasn’t, not really—but because I didn’t want to draw anything to them. I didn’t want to get them ambushed by aliens like I had Abigail’s grandparents.

  But I also didn’t want to walk it, so maybe we could regroup at their base, then find a new ride.

  “Now you know,” Mark replied. “So, you guys want that ride?”

  48

  Mark cleared room for us in the back of the truck so we didn’t have to separate, and, after loading the bags Abigail’s grandparents had packed—and Abigail’s CamelBak, which she now wore—we headed off toward Mark’s base, leaving the Cadillac behind.

  Gabriel watched it sorrowfully as we drove away.

  “I loved that car,” he said as we rounded a bend, taking it out of sight.

  A few minutes later, Abigail asked, “How long of a drive is this?”

  Though we could see the building from where we were, and though it only looked to be about a half-mile away, the roads were haphazardly blocked with downed trees and disabled cars, so we weren’t taking a direct route to it, instead going over dirt paths and through cleared forested areas.

  “Should take about another ten minutes. We have a sort of maze set up so people can’t get in so easily.”

  I wondered how they’d managed to get to us so fast through all of this stuff—it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes from when we crashed till they arrived—but didn’t say anything.

  When finally we arrived at the building, Mark, along with the rest of his group that had come out to rescue us, led us inside.

  “Here we are,” Mark said. “Home sweet home. The Factory.”

  “Factory?” I asked.

  “Used to be a factory, I think,” he replied.

  If so, it didn’t look like one anymore. There was a market on the ground floor, with stalls selling sweets and weapons and clothing, and people browsing from stall to stall.

  A lot of people. I was surprised by how many.

  “You set all this up in just a few days?” I asked.

  “Oh not me,” Mark said. “I only came here after my secret hideout was discovered. Or after I called them to me by broadcasting radio signals. But the people who run it had been fans of my show, and when they heard me go off the air they got worried, and came looking for me.” He looked at Abigail. “We should get you to the doctor. Get that head injury checked out.”

  “You have a doctor?” Gabriel asked.

  Mark nodded. “Yup. That we do.”

  I wasn’t going to let them take Abigail out of my sight, and apparently Gabriel felt the same way, so we went up a level with her and Mark and the rest of our group, to something that looked very much like an infirmary.

  Something that looked very much like the infirmary at the prison, even.

  There were a few people in the beds, though most were empty.

  As I studied the room, I wondered where they’d gotten all the supplies. And how they’d gotten them on such short notice.

  How long had it been since the evasion began? Five days? Six? I couldn’t quite remember. It started when I had been very out of it. But I thought it was something like six days.

  This was a hell of a lot of progress to make in just six days.

  “What do we have here?” a tall slender woman in a white coat said, coming up to Abigail and looking at her bandaged head.

  “This little lady hit her head on the trap,” Mark supplied.

  The woman frowned. “Were you running?”

  “No,” Abigail replied. “We crashed. I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt, and flew from the backseat into the front and slammed my head into the windshield.”

  The woman cringed. “Ouch. Mind if I take the bandage off?”

  “You’re the doctor.”

  The woman smiled. She had Abigail sit down on one of the empty beds, and unwrapped the shirt-bandage from her head, then spent a minute examining her and asking her questions—much like the ones I had asked, I was pleased to note.

  My medical training wasn’t for nothing.

  “Okay. Well, I want to get you x-rayed. While we still have power. I think you’re fine, but I’d like to be certain.”

  “You have x-rays?” Mary, Abigail’s grandmother, asked. She was standing next to Abigail, on the opposite side of the bed, holding her hand.

  “We have. For now anyway. Oh, and my name’s Dr Rathon. You can call me Jess.”

  “Abigail.”

  “Nice to meet you, Abigail.” She looked to the rest of us. “Why don’t you guys get settled in while I x-ray her.”

  “Where are you going to x-ray her?” I asked.

  “Downstairs. The machine was too big to get up here. I can show you if you like.”

  I nodded, looking at my group. I locked eyes with Hunter and tried to communicate my intent with her.

  “I’ll go with them while they get settled in,” she said.

  Wow. It actually worked.

  Or, what I wanted was so obvious that she didn’t need to read minds to be able to figure it out.

  I was surprised none of them had said anything about Hunter, or her horns.

  A fact that actually made me somewhat uneasy. It made me think of some zombie movie, where the people who were helping out the heroes said nothing about one of them being sick, looking like they had been bitten, because they’d planned to infect all of them anyway and use them for entertainment.

  It wasn’t like they hadn’t given Hunter looks.

  The whole way back here in the truck, I caught people from the other Jeeps looking at her, and even the driver of the truck occasionally glancing back in the rearview mirror.

  Even the doctor, Jess, had glanced several times at Hunter.

  It reminded me of the old saying, ‘What? Do I have horns growing out of my head?’

  Hunter very much did. At least she didn’t have wings anymore. But her skin was still that unnatural shade of red.

  And there was something else about her that was just… I didn’t know. Hard to put my finger on. Something that identified her as anything but normal.

  We all went downstairs, and then at the bottom we split up, Mark leading Gab
riel, Mary, Hunter, and Emma away, while Abigail and I went with the doctor.

  Gabriel and Mary wanted to go with Abigail, but she insisted she’d be fine and that they should go get cleaned up and get some rest.

  They did look tired. They probably hadn’t slept much while they were alone in the basement.

  I know I wouldn’t have, if I had been in their shoes.

  Of course, I hadn’t slept at all, not since I first saw that eyeless guard.

  Just the thought of him made my heart lurch.

  Or maybe it wasn’t my heart.

  I tried to push him out of my mind, for fear that I would draw him to me.

  I wasn’t sure how that worked, but I was sure it wasn’t just a delusion.

  Jess led us to a door with a folding table set to the side of it, an open laptop atop it, its screen dark.

  The door led to a large room set up as an x-ray area.

  I wondered, but couldn’t tell, what the room had been used for previously.

  “This is where we do it,” Jess said. “Not ideal, there’s probably x-rays leaking out, but it’s not like we’re using it very often.” She pointed to a table, which had a bunch of vests on it. “And we do have lead vests.”

  I nodded.

  “Why don’t you put one on honey,” she told Abigail. “And hand your friend your backpack. And then go ahead and just stand right there.” She pointed.

  Abigail handed me her CamelBak, then put the vest on and stood where she was told.

  “Alrighty,” Jess said. “I have the laptop set up outside to control this beast. Don’t like standing near x-rays if I don’t have to.”

  I almost told her that I probably didn’t need to worry about x-rays anymore, if my attack by those animal things was anything to go by. I thought if they’d had that much trouble piercing my skin, maybe x-rays would as well.

  But I wasn’t sure of that, and I wasn’t one to give information away unnecessarily, so I followed her out of the room.

  She went to the laptop on the folding table and hit a key, turning the screen on, then remotely activated the x-ray machine.

  After a minute an image of Abigail’s skull appeared on the screen.