Oblivion: The Complete Series (Books 1-9)

by Joshua James

  “No doubt,” LeFay said. She shrugged. “Well, your first little band of orphans didn’t look too impressive to me, and look how that turned out.”

  Tomas flipped her off. The survivors were still in shock from Ada’s relaying of what had happened to the others who’d gone with her to investigate the assimilation center at the downed Atlas, and didn’t seem particularly bothered with LeFay’s assessment.

  “I don’t know about this,” Tomas murmured. “How many of them can actually fight, Ada?”

  Ben shared his sentiment. The last thing they needed now was dead weight.

  “We’ve lost friends too, you know,” said the priest. His name was Father Eran, and it seemed he had better hearing than Ben gave him credit for.

  Tomas grimaced. “I don’t mean to imply—”

  “We’ve lost family,” Eran said, “and we’re not about to just sit here and hope that you come back. Because people rarely do.”

  “You’re going to fight, Father?” LeFay asked. Her question seemed more genuine than mocking, which was a surprise, coming from her. Ben was pretty sure that LeFay wasn’t the religious type.

  “I’m going to contribute. We all are.”

  “No,” Ada said, shaking her head. “Not all of you can. If you want to come, Father, that’s fine.” She pointed at the two men in fighting shape. “Perry and Reinholdt, you can come too, but that’s it. Meryl stays here with the kids. One of us will stay back here with you to help you out.”

  “No,” Meryl said.

  “Going the child soldier route?” LeFay said sarcastically. “Bold move.” She wasn’t the family type either, Ben decided. Truth be told, she didn’t seem to be the anything type.

  “I mean nobody is staying behind with us,” Meryl said caustically to LeFay. The old woman clearly wasn’t one to suffer her jabs quietly. “You need everyone with you.”

  “What will you do if those bald sons of bitches, or worse, those damn aliens, come knocking?” asked Ada.

  “I’m going to lock us in the basement, and you’ll come get us when you’re done.” Meryl crossed her arms defiantly.

  To Ben’s surprise, Ada shrugged it off. Something about Meryl’s demeanor told him that Ada and the elderly woman had locked horns before. “Fine, Meryl. You’ve clearly made up your mind. But I need you to understand that we might not make it back. And in that case…”

  Ada’s words faded away as Ben tuned her out and considered the new additions to their raiding party. To say that he wasn’t confident in them was an understatement. Perry and Reinholdt looked like eager puppies. They had no idea what was coming. And the Father, well, he had a heaviness in his sunken eyes that didn’t strike Ben as typical of a religious figure coping well with an alien invasion.

  Not that Ben thought any of them were coping that well. Clarissa seemed better, but her strange behavior was still worrisome. Ada had developed a hard edge that seemed to be a permanent part of her personality now. Tomas had a violence behind his eyes that made Ben uneasy. Only LeFay seemed like her usual self, but he wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

  And what about you?

  “I’m assuming you have weapons here,” Tomas said, “because we don’t have much left. At least, not that we aren’t already using.”

  “Weapons we have,” Ada said. “Reinholdt, go help Tomas grab all the guns, grenades, and everything we’ve got.”

  “You haven’t told us what we’re doing yet,” said Father Eran.

  “We’re running a raid on the Shapeless,” LeFay said. “Gonna try and save some people, and also blow some shit up. You game, white collar?”

  If she’d hoped to get a rise out of the priest, she was disappointed. “I believe I am,” he said calmly.

  LeFay nodded, seemingly impressed. “No worries what the big guy upstairs will think when the killing starts?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Eran said evenly, taking a rifle from Tomas with practiced hands. “God clearly doesn’t care about this place, or anything that goes on here.”

  The plan was simple to a fault, but Ada thought it was their best option, considering this wasn’t a group that could be coordinated like some precise military team.

  Ada would lead her people in a frontal assault on the Atlas. They’d be nothing more than a distraction that hopefully didn’t get squashed. While they did that, Ben, Tomas, and LeFay would infiltrate the ship, plant explosives, and finish the job.

  Because she just didn’t trust Clarissa to have her head in the game, or indeed trust her at all, Ada had insisted on bringing Clarissa along with her group. She’d acquiesced, but clearly didn’t like leaving LeFay. They seemed to have rekindled whatever old bond they’d once had.

  Leaving Ben with his short temper and Tomas with his itchy trigger finger together wasn’t ideal, but along with LeFay, she trusted them to better coordinate themselves than the others. And her group needed her to keep them from getting dead...hopefully.

  To get to the Atlas, the group snaked through the Vassar-1 streets. Getting there undetected was difficult, but most of Ada’s group knew the city well. It made for a slow trip, but they managed to get to a bombed-out apartment building’s parking lot, where they’d make final preparations, then go their separate ways.

  “I really wish we had more weapons,” said Clarissa as she took stock of what the little raiding party had.

  Tomas glanced around at the weapons everybody was holding. “Looks decent.”

  “Against cultists,” Clarissa said. “Not against Shapeless.”

  “We each have a mag of incendiary rounds from the bunker,” Ada said, “and I have a homemade flamethrower. It doesn’t have much fuel, but it’s enough if we get into a jam. Each of us have a couple of white phosphorous grenades, which helps.”

  “Impressive.”

  “We raided a military depot,” Father Eran said. “Ada informed us what kinds of weapons we’d need.”

  “I have a cold caster and a few flares,” Clarissa said, “in case we need to make a quick getaway.”

  “But you still want more, huh?” Ben said.

  “Can’t have enough,” Clarissa said.

  “No argument there,” Ada said. She actually liked what she was hearing. It wasn’t the ideal weapons to have, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and they were better stocked than they had been in earlier fights with the Shapeless.

  “And I have a whole shit ton of explosives,” LeFay added.

  Tomas glanced over at her. “I’m afraid to ask where.”

  “Everywhere,” she said with a wink.

  “Way too many for any sane individual to carry on their person,” added Clarissa.

  “That’s subjective,” LeFay said. “I think it’s perfect.”

  “Good. Good. Okay.” Ben glanced at Ada and nodded at her.

  She nodded back. “Go time,” she said.

  “Go time,” Ben agreed. “We’ll wait for your signal. Soon as the bullets start flying, we’ll sneak inside. Give us about twenty minutes, okay?”

  He was already on the move, with LeFay and Tomas in his wake. Ada watched them go when a thought occurred to her. She blurted out, “What if you run into your dad?” and then immediately regretted it. Not because it wasn’t a good point—he was going to be there, she was sure of it—but because she’d seemingly sprung it on Ben like a trap.

  Ben faltered a bit in his gait, but recovered. “Then I deal with it.”

  “And what if we run into him?” Clarissa asked.

  “You should probably run,” Ben said. “But you do what you have to do. He’s not…that’s not my father. Not really.”

  “So if one of us kills him, no hard feelings?” LeFay said with a dark smirk. “Because your old man and I have some unfinished business.”

  “Wait…who’s your father?” asked Reinholdt.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ada and a couple of others said in unison.

  “Okay, shit.” Reinholdt backed up, hands in the air in a surrender po
se. “Sorry I asked.”

  Ben turned and continued toward the pile of rubble that hid them from the open space created by the Atlas’ crash. Ada knew what was on the other side. It was the same as when they saw it from above: poor civilians lined up for the slaughter, cultists guarding and herding them.

  “We’ll meet back here in this garage and watch that damn ship blow up,” Ben said over his shoulder. “Good?” There was no waiting for an answer. “Good.”

  “Try to not get dead,” Ada said.

  Ben stopped and looked back at her. “I’ll try if you do.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  Seven

  Distractions

  Ada waited a good half hour with her group, after the others had disappeared into the rubble and ruin of Vassar-1.

  She waited until she couldn’t stand it anymore. She had to trust that they’d found their way inside and were well on their way to planting those explosives by now. The others were fidgety, except for Clarissa, who appeared to be lost in her thoughts.

  “It’s time,” Ada said.

  Clarissa stood up. The others hesitated.

  “If anyone wants to back out, now’s the time,” Ada said. “I won’t judge you. But this is your last chance.”

  Clarissa cracked her knuckles. “I’ll judge the shit out of you. Let’s go to work.”

  The others slowly stood.

  “On me,” Ada said as she led them out of the parking garage ruins, careful to stay out of sight. Clarissa took up the rear, and Ada had the distinct impression she wanted to shoot anyone who tried to bail.

  Then again, she could be just positioning herself to turn on them when the fighting started. Ada wasn’t sure.

  They had to take a circuitous route, so that their pathway couldn’t be tracked back to the rendezvous point with Ben’s group after the job was done. They finally reached a series of concrete barriers that Ada had spotted on her last trip here. Since they were still erect, they could serve as cover in the imminent fight. Up close, however, the barriers were far more pockmarked and brittle than she expected, but better than nothing.

  While the others made their way behind the barriers, Perry diverted around them. His job was a dangerous one, but Ada wasn’t surprised that he’d volunteered for it. Like far too many on Vassar-1, he’d lost everything—his family, his wife, basically his entire life—when the aliens had arrived.

  When Ada signaled the path was clear, or at least as clear as she could truthfully determine from her vantage point, Perry quietly made his way out about fifty yards from the barriers. He had to move slowly. He carried a charged hoverbike fuel cell. The corrosive, combustible liquid inside was heavy even for a big man like Perry.

  “C’mon, c’mon, hurry up, Perry,” whispered Ada as she watched his snail pace. Finally, he stopped and took the cell from his back. He slowly began pouring out the fuel in a ring that, if lit, would create a burning wall of fire that would hopefully stop any enemy advancing on the group’s position.

  “This is taking too long,” Clarissa whispered as she came up next to Ada.

  “You’re telling me.”

  Clarissa scanned with those artificial eyes Ada was so jealous of. “But so far so good,” she said, then stopped scanning. “Wait. Shit.” She pointed. “Over there.”

  Ada saw a group of cultists guarding and herding the line of innocent civilians being led into the Atlas. They looked alarmed. Two of them had turned their attention away from the line; they seemed to be signaling for others. A cluster of cultists was quickly forming. “Think they saw Perry?”

  “Either that, or Ben’s group inside the ship. Either way...” Clarissa shrugged, as if the next step were obvious.

  And it was.

  Considering no one was firing at Perry, Ada was sure it had to be the group inside the Atlas. But in heading toward the ship, they were going to stumble on Perry soon. And since the whole point of her party was to provide a distraction in case anything like that happened, it was time to start getting attention.

  “Here we go,” Ada said. She shot a flare high over Perry’s head, in the general direction of the cultist guards.

  Perry froze.

  “Move, asshole!” Ada shouted. He finally seemed to get the point. He dropped the fuel cell where he stood and began running back to the barriers.

  Ada opened fire: not with her limited incendiary rounds, but with standard high-velocity bullets. Immediately she took half of a clueless cultist’s head off.

  Just like that, the clearing erupted with gunfire. The cultists fired back at Ada, Clarissa, and Reinholdt, who joined in the fight.

  Perry ran like a drunk man, ducking and weaving as he went. He stumbled forward, diving at the last to crawl behind the forwardmost of the concrete barriers. He rolled over and gave a thumbs up to Father Eran, who threw a rifle to him.

  Or rather, he tried. It bounced a few feet short, and Ada could imagine the gun going off and killing one of them. Perry winced, but once the gun stopped bouncing around like a gutted fish, he crawled out from behind his barrier and grabbed it.

  He’d just gotten back behind the barrier, and Ada had just wondered how bad a shot the cultists were, when the barrier collapsed. She wasn’t sure what caused it. Maybe the cultists had fired a grenade at it. Maybe it had just fallen over under the force of concentrated gunfire.

  “Down!” Ada screamed, jumping up on her knee and giving as much cover as she could. The others did the same. But Perry, no doubt dazed from the impact of the barrier at least partially falling over him, climbed to his knees as he shoved a portion of concrete off his legs.

  A pair of rounds sliced into his back and ripped through his unprotected chest. Perry grunted as he somehow managed to take two steps before a third round pierced the back of his head. He fell forward among the concrete rubble.

  Shit. Another one gone just like that.

  “Watch them!” Clarissa screamed at Ada, forcing her to tear her eyes away from Perry. “They’re trying to flank us!”

  Several cultists, having pinpointed her group’s location, began running at them from both the left and the right.

  “I see ‘em!” Ada said. She controlled her breathing as she looked down the iron sights of her rifle, and waited until the cultists entered its view. With calm and ease she squeezed off a couple of rounds, killing the cultists coming from their left.

  Ada knew she didn’t quite have the same fire discipline as Clarissa. Instead of individual semi-automatic type shots, she opted for bursts of gunfire. Some bullets hit the ground around the running, advancing cultists, kicking up dirt, dust, and pieces of rock and cement. The other shots, the ones that hit their marks, caused the cultists to tumble to the ground dead.

  Things were going well at first. Despite losing Perry, Ada’s group was causing far more damage than they took. Cultists were dropping like flies as they tried to rush them over open ground with no cover. The crash clearing was alight with super-heated high-velocity rounds, going back and forth as deadly orange and red streaks in the air.

  “Reloading!” Ada ducked back behind the thick concrete barrier. From the safe side, she could hear the sound of bullets hitting her cover. It was a sharp, cracking noise that could easily unnerve the uninitiated, but at this point, there wasn’t much that could still shake her.

  That was when she noticed Father Eran.

  He hid behind the barrier, a rifle clutched close to his chest. He mumbled something to himself. Upon paying a little more attention, Ada realized that he was praying. She ducked her head down as a bullet hit the top of the concrete barrier above her. It skipped off and sent shrapnel everywhere. “We need all the help we can get!” she shouted in his direction.

  “God forgive me,” mumbled Father Eran to himself. He took a deep breath and disengaged his gun’s safety. Then he got up to one knee, placing the firearm on top of the barrier for extra support. Within seconds, a super-heated bullet burst through his front teeth and exited out the back of his head. H
e was gone before he even got the chance to fire one round.

  Ada couldn’t believe it. She looked dumbfounded at Father Eran’s slumped-over body. What was left of his face was resting in his own blood on top of the concrete barrier. That was another one she’d lost, another face to add to the growing gallery of the dead in her mind.

  “Ada!” Clarissa shouted. “Stay with me!”

  Ada couldn’t stop looking at the crumpled body of the priest. She wanted to stop; she just couldn’t. Her rifle hung limp in her hands.

  Then something smashed hard into her back. Her neck snapped hard as pain radiated out from between her shoulder blades. She somehow managed to hang on to her rifle.

  Ada turned to find Clarissa had slammed the butt of her rifle into her back. “Wake up, goddamn it!” Clarissa said. “We have a really big problem! Literally!”

  Clarissa nodded up and over their barrier. Ada slowly raised up, still feeling pain from her back. She expected to see another wave of cultists, or maybe a group of Shapeless.

  Instead, she saw a fifteen-foot-tall mass of flesh, muscle, and bone lumbering across the clearing. It was loosely humanoid in form, but it was like no creature she’d ever seen.

  Other Shapeless, screeching and angry, ran straight to their larger kin. They didn’t care what was in their way, be it cultists or innocents in line for the assimilation center; they cut through anything in their path. As Ada watched, a pair of them reached it and simply jumped onto it. Their bodies melted right into it. Two more did the same, then another two. The creature grew bigger each time.

  “What in holy hell is that thing?” asked Reinholdt. He’d stopped firing, and just looked on in awe at the hulking abomination.

  “Whatever it is, we’re gonna kill it,” Ada said. She readied her flare gun and waited for the gigantic bastard to get closer to the ring of hoverbike fuel Perry had set up.

  “Way ahead of you,” Clarissa said. She’d already loaded in her incendiary rounds. She got into firing position on one knee, rifle butt rested against her shoulder, and started to shoot. Each round was aimed roughly at what passed for the monster’s head.