Vindicta, p.5
Vindicta, page 5
Glass and metal shrieked, and sparks showered the dark with their orange luminescence. The sudden violent crash was startling and so unexpected.
And avoidable.
The Humvee was forced to slow and swerve to miss the mangled obstruction. For a split second, as they passed, Kate saw faces inside the shuttle. She didn’t know if they were alive or dead. They were going too fast.
“Rear three trucks, halt and check for survivors. Trucks one through five ascend the grade to the right. We’ll double back and take out the freaks on the hill,” Storm ordered.
Kate gripped the handhold tightly as the Humvee made a sharp turn. They passed over the curb and began climbing the gravel. The highway was at the top of the hill, and that was where the mob of freaks had come from.
The wreck was three hundred feet back, and it didn’t take long to get the full scope of the situation. Her stomach clenched at the sight.
The crowd of freaks coming down the highway were the former residents of Nashville.
Over one-hundred-thousand strong…
“Storm,” she said.
He turned, and on his face, she saw something that she was sure had never been witnessed by anyone else before in his adult life.
Fear.
“Get the guys out of there,” she begged. “It’s too late to help.”
His jaw clenched and he looked furious for a moment. Then, he keyed the mic and gave the order.
Chapter Four
One Minute After
Kate- Past
They all stared stonily ahead as they drove.
The rear guard had barely made it out alive, and by the time they had seen the size of the crowd, they had realized that shooting them would be a wasted effort.
The passengers were all dead, or soon would be.
“I don’t think anyone would have survived that wreck. It was bad,” Red said.
Think that herd will try to follow us out of here?” Harley asked, clenching the steering wheel.
“I think they’ll try. We can’t speed. It’s too dangerous, but we need to put some distance between us and them.”
“We’re going to need to ditch the Humvees when we get back to the armory. I don’t know what the plan is after that, but they are major fuel hogs,” Red said. “I’ll miss the guns though,” he added.
“Yeah, we’ll be black on fuel soon,” Harley added.
“Got enough to get us to the lake?” Storm asked.
“Yep, but not much after that probably. We’ll have to find something.”
Abruptly, a terrible wailing permeated every inch of air around them. The tone warbled and she jerked her head around to look at Red. Her heart pounded and she was certain it was about to burst from her chest.
“What the fuck is that? Is that a tornado?” she asked, looking out the window into the black.
She couldn’t see the city, or any lights other than the few blinking lights in the sky. Those were getting scarce as well.
It looked like the whole city was shutting down, maybe forever.
“No thunder or lightning. No wind,” Harley said, leaning forward to look out the front windshield.
Red looked deeply concerned.
“What?” she asked him.
He flicked a rapid glance at Storm as he turned from the front seat. She caught the questioning glance and looked at Storm.
He was frowning, even more than usual.
“That’s no storm warning.”
Red nodded slowly eyes closed. He looked…resigned?
“Then what is it?” she asked.
“Harley, get us the fuck away from this city. Go south as fast as you can,” Storm said and began relaying orders to the rest of the convoy.
“What is it?!” she yelled, fed up.
“That’s an air raid siren. Hear it? The tone is different, and it’s going up and down in pitch,” Red said loudly.
Air raid?
“You mean like planes are going to bomb the city?”
Nobody answered her.
They were speeding in the dark and she saw the lights of the others swerving crazily around behind them. This route had more obstacles, crashed cars and burned out, collapsed buildings. One wrong move and they could end up like the poor people in that shuttle.
Dead—or wishing they were.
“Take Highway 41 south, and don’t stop for anything,” Storm shouted, then relayed the information to the other Humvees and the passenger van behind them. She turned in her seat to watch behind them, but other than the headlights, she saw nothing.
The siren was still blaring its eerie, horrifying warning.
“Is it a nuke, Red?” she asked. “Someone is nuking us?”
“Don’t know, Kate. That’s just the siren. Could be an accident, or something triggered it. Hell, someone could have broken into an office somewhere and decided to have some fun. I don’t know how they work. All we can do is get the hell out of the city and wait.”
“One thing I do know—if they’re nuking us the cities are going to be potential targets. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but we need to remember that. The freaks aren’t the only thing we need to watch out for,” Storm said.
It was the most she had ever heard him say at once.
“Take 254,” Storm directed, and they slowed just enough to turn without flipping the vehicle.
She looked back again as Storm cursed.
“The teams in the rear are being attacked! They’re swarming!” he said, turning futilely to try and see behind.
“All trucks stop!” he yelled.
“Storm…” Red began.
“Shut the fuck up, Red!” Storm yelled.
The convoy came to a halt and Storm jumped up into the turret and climbed on top of the Humvee to see better. She watched his feet, and all too soon the sounds of shooting started.
“They’re breaking off! They’re cut off. Going to find another route.” Storm crawled back in and advised the other trucks as Harley got moving again. She held on.
She hoped they made it.
“Red, on the fifty. Take out anything that impedes our movement.”
“Kate, grab those ammo cans and bring them up here. They have the belted ammo. They’re heavy.”
She began shifting them over, and he was right. They were extremely heavy. She heard the rapid-fire instructions he was shooting off to the others as they traveled through the streets and neighborhoods.
The area was a congested one, and that she did not like. Too many obstacles, too many enemies, too much potential for shit to go south in a hurry.
“Done!” she called up, wincing at the strain in her muscles. It was a small pain, comparatively speaking, and barely registered.
She needed more to do, so she began reloading the empty magazines from the airport. They would probably need them very soon.
“Five mikes.”
She saw the trees begin to thicken as they approached the state park. The other evacuees should be there if they hadn’t been attacked by the freaks.
“Delta teams and Echo teams lost contact!” Storm said, and Harley cursed.
Her stomach dropped. They’d lost contact with almost half their force.
Red began firing and she looked out the front of the vehicles. She saw blurred shapes falling in the road as the headlights swept over them. The Humvee crushed their bodies and the feeling of it was something she wouldn’t ever forget.
“Two mikes out.”
“Kate, watch for anything unusual,” Storm said.
“Bivouac Lifeline, Bivouac Lifeline, this is Viper One. Do you read?” Storm radioed.
She waited, holding her breath. Would they be there?
“Roger, Bivouac Lifeline. On the move. ETA two mikes with packages,” he replied.
She released the breath. He’d made contact with someone.
“They’re there. We need to move out of here fast. Get these people back to the armory and get the rest of the guys together. I don’t know what’s going on or if that siren was a fluke, but we need to get ready for shit to get real.”
As if things aren’t real enough already?
◆◆◆
Two minutes later on the dot, they were pulling into a parking area. Two buses crowded the lot, and a small group of civilians huddled between them. One squad of men pulled security. Their headlights illuminated a dismal situation, and a depressing one for them.
They were it.
They were the saviors—the cavalry riding to the rescue. Them, with their four Humvees and a passenger van full of civvies.
Shit.
“I thought there were supposed to be more units here,” she said.
“There were,” Red said, coming down from the turret.
“Kate, on me. Red, take Charlie team and get a sit rep of the incident on the highway. See if they maintained contact with Delta One and Two, and Echo One and Two on a separate channel. Then, establish a better perimeter. Harley, get the civvies with the others and keep them calm.”
Kate followed Storm past the sentries to the small group of soldiers gathered near the civilians. She wondered if these were people from the airport. She wondered if they were waiting for friends and family to join them.
A man came up to them and checked Storm’s name and rank. “Sergeant Storm. We’ve got a problem.”
He was an older man, and she recognized his rank. Storm didn’t salute.
“Lieutenant,” Storm said with a nod. “I think we’ve got more than one problem,” Storm acknowledged.
“Our people never came back from the last run,” he said. “Lost contact and never came back. That was three hours ago.”
“Where?” Storm asked.
“Vanderbilt,” he said.
“Damn.” He ran a hand through his sweat-soaked hair and sighed. “Sir, I don’t think they’re coming back.”
Kate turned away so she wasn’t gawking at a grieving man. The sky was clearing, and the stars were starting to come out. Through the trees, she spotted an orange streak.
Meteorite, or maybe a jet?
The sirens wailed their warning cries again, winding up to the banshee-like scream.
The fire in the sky was traveling at a constant speed and on a set course…
“Storm, look!” she yelled and pointed at the object.
Storm shifted infinitesimally closer to her. It was just enough to make her feel less alone. The people all stopped their furtive, scared murmurings to look.
She saw another fire streaking across the sky, heading further away.
And another…
And another...
“Well…it’s nice to know that someone is still sitting pretty at NORAD,” the lieutenant said. He sounded fatalistic.
“Well…they were,” Harley said.
The howling alarm had rung true.
A streak of light came from a different angle.
“Take cover! GET DOWN! Everybody get down!” Storm suddenly screamed to the startled people.
She didn’t get a chance to see if anyone listened.
Kate had a split second to look at him in confusion as he lunged toward her and dragged her into the dirt. His sweaty chest was smashed against her face and his weight was crushing her lungs. She felt him shift and his body vibrated as he yelled.
“Don’t look at the flash!”
The flash.
So, it was a bomb.
Her heart sped so fast that she couldn’t discern the individual beats, and her mouth tasted of metal. Her face hurt where her stitches hadn’t healed all the way, and she wondered if the new skin had torn under the assault.
Was this it? The end?
He adjusted his weight and he wasn’t quite so heavy anymore. His arms completely encircled her head. She probably couldn’t see if she wanted to.
“Close your eyes and don’t look,” he rumbled, breath ghosting across her ear, fighting to be heard over the nuclear sirens and her own thunderous heart.
Despite being completely surrounded by his arms, the moment the flash hit her eyelids burned bright and brilliant red neon. She clutched his sides tightly and bit her lip at the light, and at the sensation of being a short distance away from hundreds of thousands of dying or dead people.
She heard groans and cries as a punch of scalding-hot wind smacked everything in reach. Glass cracked in some of the bus windows as the blast wave cut through the area. Trees bowed and branches broke under the assault.
A deep, powerful, rumbling crescendo resounded throughout the region, and likely throughout the continent as the targets were struck, and lives extinguished with apocalyptic force. Explosive vibrations of sound ricocheted through the air, shaking the bus windows and crashing through the trees. It was a bellowing funeral toll of the fiery cataclysm that incinerated millions.
And quite possibly millions more across the globe…that violent sphere.
The sirens had stopped, but the nightmare had truly just begun.
The pressure in her head and chest was intense and she felt lightheaded. Nausea roiled as the shockwave washed over them, leaving her skin hot and dry. The air crackled around them in the aftermath, and the screams of the civilians finally permeated the fog in her head.
“Help! Help me!” a woman cried.
People crowded around, uncertain and frozen with fear.
Kate turned toward the wailing woman and saw her clutching her eyes. A soldier, face dirty and soiled with sweat, rushed her to the bus. She heard the woman crying over the quickly growing din.
“They nuked us! They really fucking nuked us!” a man said.
“I bet it was China,” another said, helping the first man to his feet.
“Russia still has a big stockpile,” the first man replied.
Their faces were orange in the newly-bourgeoning sun to the north.
“Come on, Kate. Get up. We’ve got to haul ass,” Storm said, pulling her off the ground. “How are your eyes?” he asked as he took his gaze off the blossoming mushroom cloud long enough to study her face and arms.
“My eyes are fine. Is there going to be radiation?” she asked, watching in amazement and horror and bone-deep terror as the clouds bloomed out.
Rings formed around the periphery of the main cloud, which rose to monolithic heights and presented such a fearsome picture that she didn’t want to look anymore, but she couldn’t help it.
It was the largest, most deadly thing she’d ever seen in her life.
“There’s fire!” someone called, as smoke rose in the distance, between them and the city.
“No shit,” someone said from behind her.
It was the jackass. Feckley.
She didn’t even have the reflexes left to jump as he startled her.
“Guess they got the spider,” he said with a smirk.
She frowned but did not comment. It seemed his assholery knew no bounds.
“Feckley, get the people together. Check the vehicles. We’ve got to move and move fast,” Storm said, still watching the cloud. “I’ve got to go find the Lieutenant. Stay here!” he told her.
She watched him go around the front of the bus, murmuring to the awestruck civilians as he passed by.
“Red!” Kate called suddenly. “Red!”
She whirled around, looking off toward the perimeter where the guys were supposed to have been beefing up security. Their forms were motionless, watching the cloud as it still grew above the city.
She glanced back at it again. She was afraid it would never stop. It might just swallow the world.
She turned back and rushed toward the darker part of the lot. She touched the holster of her pistol to make sure it hadn’t gone anywhere.
She heard a huff behind her as she ran. Thuds of booted feet told her that she had company. Looking back, she spotted Feckley.
The look on his face was predatory and unguarded. He hadn’t meant for her to see it, and he quickly masked it.
It would be a mistake to be caught alone with him.
“Red!” she called out.
She heard a muffled grunt right inside the trees and stopped short as a blurry, indistinct shape wrestled with a man on the ground.
His pale face and wide, white eyes betrayed his fear. Blood—streaked and black in the dim light— marked his skin. He was weakening. She might hit him if she tried to shoot the thing.
She didn’t think. She lunged.
A loud, hissing roar filled her ears as she threw herself into the equivalent of a brick wall. A brick wall with claws, teeth, and the strength of several strong men.
She clutched the foreign, hot body and felt the sinewy muscle roil under her hands. She felt a sharp tug on her head as the monster clawed her scalp and yanked her head back. Her throat was exposed, and she had no time to form any sort of coherent thought.
She kicked out with her feet, thankful that she had worn boots instead of sneakers. The impact caused the creature to jerk on her head, but at least the jagged, rusty-colored incisors left her throat.
She heard a loud bang and the wind of a bullet as it whizzed by her head. The sound and the action made her freeze, clawing the dirt and the thing’s body. The mutated, freak thing’s face collapsed in on itself in the center. Black liquid poured onto the soil and it finally dropped.
It took her with it.
Her braid was ragged from the struggle, and it had tangled around the monster’s arm. A hand reached down and stilled her struggles.
“Untangle or cut?” Red asked tiredly.
She sighed and hung her head.
The last twenty-four hours had been such a cluster. She went from being in the middle of an overrun city to sitting on the outskirts watching a nuclear-fucking-bomb blow Nashville sky high—and probably turning it into a wasteland for the rest of her life, at least.
“Kate?” he prodded.
“Cut it. We have to go,” she said.
The corpse began to blacken and harden as he worked. Her red hair, once so bright and shiny, looked obscene and ragged against the dead freak’s skin. She yanked the clump away and tossed it in the weeds.
“You okay?” she asked.
Red looked worse for the wear. He was pale and bleeding from a laceration on his head. He gave her a thumbs up.
