Beyond Armageddon V: Fusion (42 page)

“I understand, your Excellency.”

Then it stood over Nina and glared at her through emerald eyes on a face covered in decaying skin.

“Do not fear, my child. Soon we will purge these unpleasant hours from your mind and return you to your human compatriots. You have a duty to perform for the blessed Voggoth.”

The Bishop glared at an underling as he moved away from the blob-like Chariot transport and walked—nearly glided—across the pavement of the parking lot. The young Missionary man who met him bowed and they spoke, but Nina could not hear the conversation as she watched the Bishop’s arrival through binoculars.

She felt her heart thump faster and a wave of anger build in her bones.

Next to her along the berm lay Carl Bly with his own pair of binoculars eyeing the new arrival. The two hid at the fringe of a ring of vacant cookie-cutter duplexes to the west.

“Man, I think that’s the first time I ever saw one of those Order guys looking pissed off. Whoever he is, he’s not happy. I guess a couple of B-52s can pretty much ruin anybody’s shit.”

Nina’s team received news of yesterday’s strike via radio, the same radio call wherein she had requested—again—for transports to be sent to Clinton, Missouri. Her team directed any survivors they came across to that small town.

Command’s answer? Vague. A sort of ‘we’ll see what we can do’. At the very least Nina hoped they could air drop supplies to the survivors but even that remained uncertain.

But thoughts of survivors, air strikes, and supplies held little importance at that moment. She remained focused on the creature dressed in clergy garb with emerald eyes and a robe underneath which things squirmed.

She recognized him.

Not a memory passed from Trevor’s consciousness to hers. Not a falsehood planted by Voggoth’s henchmen. A real memory. One originally suppressed during her captivity. This memory belonged to Nina, like those other memories from The Order’s prison where they had infected her with their implants.

Bly spoke unaware of Nina’s silent rage, “Cap, this was a good idea on paper. Doesn’t look like they’ve got a lot of security around. But this place is huge. We don’t have enough C-4 to bring it all down.”

Bly referred to the massive series of warehouses formerly owned and operated by Sysco Foods of Olathe, Kansas. Years ago the world’s largest food distribution company used the place to store everything from frozen mozzarella sticks to prime rib to bags of soda syrup. The entire complex stretched hundreds of yards from south to north parallel to Interstate 35. Rows of discarded tractor trailers lined the docking bays; abandoned cars lay swept into a pile at the perimeter of the massive parking lot; a handful of monks walked patrols with support from Spider Sentries and Ogres.

The facility seemingly served two functions. First as a refueling depot for The Order’s Chariots. The blob-ish ships swooped in, hovered above the center of the complex, and received fuel via wiggling tubes protruding from roof-mounted piles of metal and bubbling black rock.

That fuel, in turn, arrived at the complex in the form of a dark gel transported in on boat-like vehicles escorted by Shell Tanks. As far as intelligence could discern, Voggoth’s minions drained this ‘fuel’ directly from the soil, sapping the Earth of nutrients that could be used to grow crops.

The second purpose of the facility appeared to be command and control. Gordon Knox’s intelligence people suspected that directives—such as where to march and what to do—were delivered to The Order’s troops via broadcasts of some kind, perhaps radio waves, maybe even telepathy. All attempts to isolate and block those broadcasts had failed.

Nonetheless, those orders came from Voggoth from his Temple in the Urals to his army via his cadre of clergymen, in which the Bishop held high rank. The theory held that the Bishop distributed these orders via various Missionaries and couriers, with various levels of redundancy.

All of this knowledge held little interest to Nina as she watched the Bishop enter the facility with a gang of monks and a Missionary providing escort. Overhead an orange sunset shared the sky with a slow-moving veil of gray; not The Order’s storm but rain clouds of Earthly origin.

“You’d think they’d guard this thing with a little more heavy duty shit,” Bly went on, still not noticing Nina’s silence. “But I guess that clicks with what we were hearing this morning.”

Bly meant reports of Wraiths, Roachbots, Mutants, Ghouls and more pouring toward Excelsior Springs like ants to a picnic. Reinforcements, no doubt, for The Order’s core army elements destroyed by the B-52s.

When she did not react, Bly asked, “So what is it, Cap? This place a good target still?”

“The place? No,” she answered and thought
but the Bishop, yes.

“Get the others ready. We hit it when the sun goes down.”

One of the blob-shaped Chariot craft hovered above the center of the complex. A series of pulsing red and green lights from the craft’s underbelly lit the starless, rainy night. In response, a black hose slithered from the roof like a snake rising from a basket and met a bulging orifice underneath the flyer. A burst of steam signaled the cementing of their bond.

Glug-glug-glug.

The sound carried above the noise of a steady rain clanging off the roof and drumming on the pavement as The Order’s version of fuel pumped up from a pile that resembled charcoal-colored gelatin atop the occupied warehouse.

After a few minutes, another burst of steam squirted from the bond and the hose fell away. The Chariot’s engines hissed louder and the ship flew away, passing over the dark parking lot on its way south.

The Dark Wolves moved between wrecked cars and approached the large complex. Nina halted her group and, through night vision goggles, eyed their entry point.

She saw the remains of a human building of metal and glass and concrete succumbing to tendrils of green and black ivory although the grainy haze of the night vision did not afford much detail.

She spied a steel door that had once been an employee entrance. Two monks wearing soaked brown robes stood guard outside, each armed with The Order’s version of swords attached to rope belts as well as forearm-mounted pellet guns. Above the door a solitary orb of light provided a cone of illumination.

Oliver Maddock joined Nina at the front of the group. They both raised suppressed Colt M4s. Two quick pops broke the silence in the parking lot followed by two damp
thumps
as the alien-assimilated bodies dropped.

Caesar and Bly raced forward with the latter making a little more
jingle
and
clink
than Nina preferred due to the light machine gun he carried.

Nina approached and opened the door. A gust of foul-smelling air rushed out. The Dark Wolves moved inside.

The interior lighting immediately created problems for the team. They entered a long concrete hall with doors to either side. A pair of thick root-like conduits ran the tops of the walls, probably carrying electricity or fluids or whatever ungodly substances The Order needed to run their horror chambers. Two glowing balls provided patches of an almost liquid-like light illuminating either end of the corridor. The rest of the passage remained dark.

Nina removed her night vision. The others did the same. While shadows still remained the light created enough interference to make the high-tech gear more a liability than an asset.

They walked the hall stopping at each door to glance inside. They found empty offices with smashed computers, a chamber full of dust-covered filing cabinets, and a janitorial closet overrun with mice.

A continual rumble reverberated through the complex, helping to hide their footfalls but the sound added to the tension. Anywhere else Nina would say the noise probably came from large machines chugging away somewhere at the heart of the complex. But inside those walls laced with organic-like conduits and filled with the smell of decay, she easily imagined the noise to come from a giant creature. The noise of the machine or monster—whatever it may be—joined with the constant metallic pitter-patter of raindrops on the roof to create enough sound to make ‘hearing’ the least reliable of their senses.

They reached the end of the hall and paused where a human door had been replaced with skin-like drapes. A humid breeze blew in from beyond and a sound like a nervous stomach rumbling broadcast over unseen loudspeakers.

Something big moved past the other side of those drapes en route to wherever its orders commanded.

Nina used her silenced gun barrel to separate the slit sheaths and eye the darkness beyond. She saw a large room. The concrete floor wore yellow and white caution and traffic lines and a forklift lay toppled against one wall. Several rows of metal racks lined the chamber and loading docks remained sealed to the west.

Directly across from her position a wide archway with straps of heavy plastic offered access to one of the larger warehouses while this room, she realized, served as a loading and unloading zone for trucks.

Again, just enough glowing orbs hung on the wall to make night vision impractical.

Nina sent Vince first, then Carl, then Oliver, and then herself from the entrance hall and across the chamber. No signs of enemy activity. No hint of security devices.

The wolves gathered by the archway and then pushed through the sheets of plastic and entered a wide hall. Empty pallets, several parked forklifts, and wheeled garbage bins sat discarded to either side. Metal bulkheads—like small garage doors—lined the walls and the ceiling reached six stories tall but everything higher than twenty feet remained hidden in darkness. The lights along the big corridor provided only spotlight-like spheres of bright in an otherwise empty passage. The constant drum of rain on the rooftop echoed all around.

Nina felt naked in the open, but saw no cover.

Thirty yards away—at the far end of the hall—loomed a closed sliding door. Nina guessed the larger warehouses waited ahead and the Bishop somewhere further beyond.

The sound of another Chariot flying low over the building drew her attention for a moment. Nina wished she had not sent Odin with the human survivors. She forgot how much they depending on his sensitive canine nose.

“Cap?”

Nina answered Vince with a wave of her arm ordering them to spread out and move forward. The rain increased. The Chariot’s engines sounded directly overhead. Nina glanced toward the ceiling again and saw only black.

What was that?

Did something move up there?

She heard—they all heard—a soft
clang.
Like a chain tapping against metal.

Nina gripped her rifle tight and took mental stock of her armaments: the Mac-11 in a shoulder harness; the desert eagle on a thigh rig; four grenades on her belt and—as a last resort—a short sword strapped to her left leg. She also carried a detpack in her kit.

They reached the halfway point of the hall. The closed door loomed ahead.

Oliver Maddock walked a step behind and to Nina’s right. The other two stayed close to the far wall.

The sound came again. A rattle. A squeak. Louder.

Nina’s eyes darted from wall to ceiling. Vince and Bly hurried toward the sliding door. Maddock checked their rear, turning around in time to see the thing drop from the shadows and swing toward his gut.

He raised his rifle and pulled the trigger. His silenced rounds went askew as the thing shaped like a scorpion’s tail cut into his chest and hauled him up into the darkness above.

More of that clanging noise.

Nina saw him go. She raised her rifle, but suddenly the darkness turned to bright as a hundred orbs of light sprung to life along the hall. She shielded her eyes with an arm and instinctively dove for a spot low against the wall. Maddock—screaming his last breaths—went higher and higher into the rafters carried by the half-shell, half-iron scorpion tail hanging from a series of chains and pulleys.

As it neared the crisscross of rafters above, the tail uncurled and let the man fall from 50 feet to the concrete. Nina—her eyes barely adjusted to the newfound illumination—could do nothing to save him. He and his gear hit the ground with a sickening crunch.

The metal door slid open of its own accord. Two Spider Sentries stood in the entry on their spindly legs. Their high-powered rapid-fire pellet guns fired. Vince Caesar barely avoided a burst as he rolled toward the wall and returned fire with his carbine.

Bly dropped into a prone position and rested his M-249 on its small tripods. As the alien rounds skipped across the concrete around him, Carl Bly fired a fierce volley. The loud
rat-tat-tat
of the machine gun joined with the falling rain, the complex’s constant rumble, and the hiss of Spider Sentry guns to fill the hall with an eclectic mix of sound that bounced off the high ceiling and echoed to ear-splitting levels.

Bly’s first rounds went wide but his steady hand guided the hose-like stream of bullets into one of the Spiders. Its round head disintegrated into goo.

Nina felt a shot hit her high in the shoulder, catching uniform and padding but not flesh. She concentrated her M4 at the head. The silenced rounds fired from her carbine in a series of pops. Those bullets annoyed the Sentry—knocked its round head side to side—but could not only chipped at its flesh.