Bigfoot War 3: Food Chain (6 page)

Greg’s ears rang so loudly that if the giant spoke to him as it turned back to look him over, he’d never hear it. The world spun as his head thudded into the grass and his eyes closed from the pain.

* * *

Wally’s hope of finding
Bree
was too intense to allow him to even consider why Colonel Holmes had the information he’d given him. It didn’t matter, he told himself. If the colonel arrived at New Denver, Thane would be waiting for him. No one messed with the general and lived to tell about it.

Wally kept the jeep he had convinced the colonel to hand over to him at a near constant fifty-miles-per-hour pace. He would’ve full-out gunned it, but the road was too cluttered with the skeletal remains of cars and trucks from the days before the beasts came to risk it. Even his current speed was dangerous and would’ve been lethal to anyone without his highly-developed reflexes. He swerved around an overturned, rusting mini-van and kept heading south. The colonel claimed there was a functioning military installation there which had survived the death of civilization. As he drove, he passed the occasional small packs of the hungry dead. They eyed him from the roadside, moaning their anger and frustration at having an unreachable meal speed by them. A couple of the things managed to get on the road in front of him only to be ran down and crushed beneath the jeep’s wheels after bouncing off its hood. Patches of blackened, stale blood and pus splattered the windshield as a reminder of those encounters. The dead no longer had the numbers to be a real threat to someone like him unless he got careless.

Soon after, Wally slowed the jeep, realizing he was almost to his destination. With a roar, the beast came charging at him from the trees. He tried to swerve the jeep out of its path, but it was too late. The monster slammed into it. Its hunched-over form plowed into the jeep’s side, its shoulder bending metal and lifting the jeep’s tires from the road. The jeep flipped over as Wally’s perception of time slowed to a crawl. He tilted his head towards the top of the windshield to look at the ancient road quickly coming up towards him. He disengaged his seatbelt and threw himself from his seat. Fractions of a second later the jeep landed on its side several feet from him with a loud crunching noise before continuing to slide into the bank beside the road. The asphalt tore up his skin as he rolled across it in the jeep’s wake, carried on by the momentum of his fall. With a flip that carried him briefly back into the air, Wally hopped to his feet, his sword yanked free of its scabbard and ready in his hands.

The beast stood a good fifteen feet from him, its yellow eyes blazing in the moonlight. Wally shifted into a different posture, waiting for it to make the next move. A low growl rumbled up from its throat. As it came at him, Wally’s blade slashed open its thighs. He ducked under the swing of one of its massive fists and let the movement carry him behind the beast. He came up, delivering a deep cut up its back, parallel to its spinal column. The beast grunted, staggering, as blood poured from the deep wound. It whirled to face him as he moved in for the kill. The beast raised a hand to stop him. Wally’s first swing took off three of its fingers, knocking the hand aside before his backswing darted under the beast’s chin, opening its throat in a bloody spray. With a cry that quickly transformed into a gargle, the beast fell. Wally closed in closer still, slamming his blade into its skull to make sure it wouldn’t be getting up. Only then did he back away, assuming a defensive stance again.

Something wasn’t right. He was being watched.

* * *

Thane puffed on a cigarette as he observed the chaos around him. More than half of the city guard was dead and the city’s gates trashed beyond repair. He’d heard more than three dozen civilians died in the Last Federation’s attack on the gates and who knew how many more as the Apache rained death from the sky in the inner streets. New Denver was in bad shape and vulnerable. If the beasts made another run on it anytime soon, nothing short of a divine miracle was going to save it. That was, of course, if it survived the dead. There was no hope that the remaining part of the guard could contain all the
rotters
rising up around them. He knew he would miss the power he’d held here—and the women—but he was a man who knew when it was time to cut and run.

Sebastian was hard at work already getting the APC ready hit the road. Thane had sent Roberts and Brian to collect more fuel and supplies from the city’s stores. He wanted to be loaded to the max since they wouldn’t be returning.

The power of New Denver’s council was broken and there was no one left alive in the remainder of the guard who had the guts to challenge Roberts, much less himself. When the giant, Amazon warrior came limping back carrying all she could, the four of them would leave this place to the flames and the death that was surely coming.

Thane watched a rotter chasing a lady in green, her flowing dress speeding past him. He shook his head with a smirk on his face. People were so useless unless they knew how to take care of themselves, and the civilians of New Denver certainly didn’t. He’d rid the area around the APC of
rotters
himself in a matter of minutes before Sebastian had even started his work on the vehicle. If Wally had been here, maybe things would have played out differently. A second rotter followed in the wake of the first. He didn’t notice it until it was on top of him.
Its
cold hands grabbed his shoulders and rammed him into the side of the APC. Thane head-butted it and gave it a kick as it staggered backwards, falling onto its butt. Not even bothering with the pistol holstered on his hip, Thane took hold of the rotter and snapped its neck. Its body flopped over and lay still in front of him. He frowned at the red hand prints on the shoulders of his uniform. It was just one more thing he was going to make Wally pay for when he caught up to him. Thane knew the others would resent him for continuing on with their original mission, but they’d come along nonetheless. They all knew their best hope of survival lay in sticking with him until they found a new home.

An elderly gentlemen in white robes, looking rather disturbed at the risk of being outside the council building, accompanied by a trio of heavily-armed members of the guard, approached him. Thane chuckled and exhaled a plume of smoke at them. Apparently, he’d underestimated how stupid some folks could be, but then Councilman Lucas had always been a fool, drunk on his own delusions of importance.

“General Thane,” Lucas snapped. “Why are you standing there doing nothing? The streets are filled with panic and the city is coming apart at the seams. The dead are
inside
the walls!”

“Not my problem anymore.” He shrugged, showing his tobacco-stained teeth in a wicked grin to the guards accompanying the old man. They looked like they were ready to crap themselves at his subtle threat. “My squad and I are leaving ASAP.”

“Leaving? I think not. Your place is here, General, and that vehicle is the property of the City of New Denver, not yours to do with as you wish.”

Before the guards could react, Thane stepped forward and sunk his knife up into the old man’s stomach. Lucas gaped at him, wide-eyed in disbelief. Thane drove the knife deeper until he could feel Lucas’s wet and soft innards touching his skin. Thane removed his blade and shoved Lucas’s body away. The guards gawked at him, clearly unsure of what to do. Thane shot them a demonically gleeful look, challenging them to make a move.

“We don’t want any trouble, General Thane,” one of them said at last.

“Then don’t make any,” he told them.

The guard who had spoken nodded, and the trio hurried away into the growing crowd of people loaded with their belongings, trying to press through the shattered gates like frightened cattle, while the moans of the dead rose and grew louder in the inner city.

Thane climbed into the APC. Brian sat in the driver’s seat, already getting it fired up. Roberts and an exhausted Sebastian reclined in the rear.

“I do think it’s time we were going.” Thane motioned for Brian to punch it as he took a seat beside him.

* * *

Greg really felt as if he was dreaming, the internal alarm of “this is not real” sounding in the back of his mind. He lay in a clean and soft bed with a real, electric light shining above him. A man with gray-flecked, black hair and glasses sat beside the bed.

“Welcome back,” the man said.

“Where am I?” Greg asked, trying to sit up. The room spun and he lowered himself back down on the side of the bed.

“It’s a bit too soon for that, I’m afraid,” the man told him. “As dehydrated and malnourished as you were, it’s amazing you’re even conscious yet.”

Greg looked at him.

“I’m Dr. Morrison and you are inside The Bunker.”

“The Bunker?” Greg tried to hide his amusement at the name.

Dr. Morrison laughed. “Yes, it’s a stupid thing to call this place, I agree, but nonetheless, it’s the name that stuck. Regardless, what matters is that you’re safe now.”

“Am I?”

“Oh yes. The Bunker is the last fully functional military and research facility in the world that we’re aware of. You’re well below the ground, unreachable by the beasts and the dead alike. Over two hundred people call this base home. That includes a garrison of soldiers and a dozen pilots. We have a fully working, fusion reactor and enough supplies to continue our work here for years to come.”

“What kind of work?”

“Well, let’s see. There’s the bio division, who are searching for a vaccine against the dead virus, the physicists who keep our reactor online and work to better understand and reproduce it, and the military branch who remain at war with the beasts and hope to soon eradicate all those within this area now that the new Wolf suits have been field tested.”

Greg didn’t know what to say. This place really was a dream.

Dr. Morrison must have sensed his disbelief because he said, “I know this is all a bit much to take in, but believe me, you’re welcome here. We can use all the help we can get. When you’re able, I will give you a tour of The Bunker and we’ll figure out where you can be the most help if you wish to stay. I can promise you’ll find this place better than anything you’ll come across topside.” Then, with a sly grin, he added, “We even have coffee.”

* * *

Wally stood over the beast’s corpse, his sword held ready in his hands. He could sense he wasn’t alone. The night was cool and still. His gaze scanned the trees, searching for whoever or whatever else was out there. Seconds ticked into minutes, but he still retained his defensive posture and waited.

Finally, a man in a gray uniform stepped out from the shadows. “Man, you can ease up, okay? It’s cool.”

“Are you with Colonel Holmes?” Wally asked.

The man in gray shook his head. “Never heard of him. Sorry, bro. Listen, we’re grateful you took down that beast, but this is a secure area. You got two choices: hand over your weapons and come with me or head back the way you came. That clear enough?”

“Crystal,” Wally answered, “but I am not going anywhere until I find what I came for.”

“That
was
impressive, what you did there.” The man gestured at the beast’s body. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone kill one of those things in hand-to-hand combat like that, but don’t let it fool you into thinking you got a shot against us.”

Wally watched as the man waved at something in the trees.

“Come on out, boys. It’s our turn to make an impression.”

A hulking, metal juggernaut carrying a cannon almost as big as Wally himself emerged to the man’s right. To the left, a smaller, sleeker-though-equally-deadly-looking one followed the first. Wally lowered his sword, unsure of what to do. Tech like what he was seeing didn’t even exist in the old world before the Fall. How could those things be real?

“That’s right, bro,” the man told him. “Thought you’d see it our way.”

“What . . . what are they?” Wally stammered as one of the huge machines took a step closer to him, its green slit of an eye glowing in the starlight.

“Put your weapons down, come with me, and you’ll find out. We could really use someone like you.”

Wally gently laid his sword on the grass and began to unload the rest of his weapons beside it. When he was done, he pulled his photo of
Bree
from his backpack and handed it to the man in gray. “She’s what I’m looking for. Do you know her?”