Project Northwoods (61 page)

James gave a whoop of triumph as the explosion evaporated into the night. He was sweating… they were all sweating after the flying douchebag grabbed the ambulance and started frying it, but they were free, now. No more Enforcers, no more prison… freedom! He turned to Arthur and Talia, who were cheering as they held each other. “Can I get in on that?”

Releasing his grip on Talia, Arthur clamped onto him. He was off in a moment, pointing out the hole. “Did you see that shit? One in a million!” His voice was hoarse with yelling.

James smiled. “She totally murdered that dude with a motorcycle.”

The cheerful nature of the escape vehicle immediately died down. Lips were still curved upwards, but Talia pushed herself by the two of them and quietly moved to the front. James hadn’t meant to bring everyone down.
Poor choice of word, ‘murder’.

Talia turned to Arthur, brushing her hair back from her face. “Mat says that Catalina is on the roof.”

James looked up to the ceiling, noticing for the first time the hatch built into it. Before Arthur could struggle to get it open, James stood up on one of the small benches charitably left inside when the vehicle had been gutted for munitions purposes. James popped the latch, gripped the side, and leapt.

It was an easy up-and-over maneuver, not nearly as impressive as he could be, but nevertheless, he was on top of the ambulance, wind whipping by his ears and drowning out everything else. Catalina was practically in front of him and barely seemed to register his presence.

He offered a hand to her. “Take my hand!” he shouted, gesturing with it. Eventually, she clasped it and he pulled her gently up before lowering her into the hatch. He was about to clamber in when a spotlight erupted on the ambulance. He looked up into the blinding light, frightened but at the same time allured by the floating shape. Something pulled at his hand balanced by the hatch, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.

“Attention, villains.” His heart pounded as he fully understood what floated above the mysterious spotlight. “The occupants of your vehicle have been designated rogue by the High Consul. Failure to yield has granted authorization of lethal force.”

With a flash, unseen engines kicked on, making the search drone blast off behind them, sweep in low, then rapidly gain on their vehicle. The thing was a squat oval, a little wider than their own transport, smooth with the exception of a black screen which ran the width of its front. It gave the impression that it was watching them from behind a pair of shades. Two bulges on either side of the flying machine housed the turbine engines, propelling it through the skies.

James now realized the others were pulling on his hand, begging him to come back inside. He obliged, sinking into a shouting match. The only silent one was Catalina, who was busy nursing her shoulder. Ignoring the others, she wobbled to her feet before slamming her arm into the wall and pushing the bone back into its socket. With a grunt, her eyes rolled back as she collapsed to the floor in a daze.

“Drive-drive-drive-drive-drive!” Allison was chanting above everyone else.

“There is no inherent quantity of driving I can increase!” Mat snapped at everyone with an open mouth.

The search drone was now close enough for them to see the gun pods flanking the search light on its underbelly. With a loud click, they began to spin, gaining speed.

“Get down!” James shouted.

The guns flared, trailing after the ambulance as Mat attempted to outmaneuver the rain of bullets. The sounds of metal being bitten into and rebounded off of were sporadic, but enough to make everyone flinch. The assault finally petered out after Mat had managed to swerve through most of the metal hail. “Everyone okay?” he asked.

James looked up, felt his chest, and heaved a sigh of relief. “Yes, I’m fine!”

“Maty!” Allison shouted.

“It’s fine!” The ambulance swerved. “Don’t touch it!”

“How far is it to…” Arthur trailed off. “Wherever it is we’re going?”

“Just a few miles!” Mat shouted, punctuating it with a scream of pain. “I said don’t touch it!”

“We won’t last that long!” Talia said as she banged into the wall due to Mat’s erratic driving.

The drone fell back a bit as something loud clicked into place. With a hiss, a rocket sped toward the ambulance. Mat saw it in the side mirror and changed course. James felt a quiver of even greater fear than he was experiencing before when the missile self-corrected and matched Mat’s new course.

With a sudden twist of the wheel, the ambulance swerved in time to avoid the rocket detonating into the pavement meters from where they were. The blast knocked the passengers about as the vehicle groaned in protest. The flying machine fired another rocket.

“I think it’s time to take that thing out!” Allison shouted. She squeezed her way out of the front to unlock a cabinet behind the passenger side, revealing a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a designation James could make thanks to years of studying war footage.

“It won’t do any good!” James yelled with a shake of his head. The ambulance jerked them again to the side, sparing them a screaming death in favor of a few contusions now. “That armor will resist bullets, rockets…”

“What if we age the armor?” Arthur asked, looking at Talia. She met his gaze briefly, only to return it to another explosive payload rocketing their way.

James looked between them. “Age? What…”

Talia cut James off. “It won’t be pretty, but it’s possible.” She looked at her assistant. “Can you get me on top of that search drone?”

Still a little confused, James gave what he hoped was a self-assured smile. “I can get you up there, no problem.” James was trying to sound cocky, but was fairly sure his fear was showing through. The ambulance jerked again, but James and Talia had grown used to the evasive maneuvers and continued to stand. She popped up the ceiling hatch and clambered up and out before James simply leapt out after her.

The wind was whipping through his hair again, and James froze when he landed on the roof. The drone was nearing now, the closing distance temporarily confusing its targeting system. Talia moved around to James’s back and grabbed onto his shoulders.

“Whenever you’re ready, Flea.” The sound of the name thrilled him, almost to the point where the now spinning gun-pods had become less an issue and more a distraction. “Flea!”

Snapped back to reality, he knelt down and felt her grab him tighter before he leapt. Jumping was what he did best, and innumerable calculations had already sped through his brain before he had even left the ambulance. It wasn’t luck so much as skill that allowed him to land squarely on the automated weapon, immediately kneeling to let Talia down. She set to work, crouching, hands on the metal surface as the gun pods opened up, raining bullets on the streets below.

“This shouldn’t be hard!” she shouted, apparently trying to sound just as sure of herself as he did earlier. “I’m just aging the armor… nothing specific!”

It took what felt like hours before something happened. Like a ripple, the metal buckled and groaned, immediately turning from silver-white to dull grey as paint flecked off into the night. Talia began to grunt with effort as rivets began to warp and deform. Rust spread throughout the surface, flecking off at the high speed wind.

Below, Allison popped out of the roof hatch, bringing up the rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The vehicle was still swerving to avoid the deadly hail, but she nevertheless shouldered it and aimed it squarely at them.

“Time to go, Talia!” he shouted, picking her up. She staggered upwards before turning and latching onto his back. “We need them to slow down!”

She pawed at her earpiece. “Mat, we’re done!”

The ambulance braked, and James leapt from the search drone as Allison fired the rocket. The two aerial bodies passed each other in mid-flight, James feeling the scalding heat of the rocket as he fell past it. He slammed into the ambulance’s roof as Allison darted below. Talia released him as he turned to watch the rocket slam into the rusted armor, blowing clear through it, then detonate inside the machine.

The thing went into an explosive tailspin, vomiting fire and chunks of metal as it went. It lost altitude as the ambulance sped up to escape. The search drone hit the ground, spinning end over end, exploding in a series of violent bursts as the fuel lines erupted. The flames then turned on the remaining rockets and ammunition stores. With a final, dulled whump, the wreckage went up in a mushrooming fireball before fading into a small blaze rapidly growing smaller.

BRUSH FIRE

June 28
th
, 2011

Nearing Midnight

SERGEANT LEAMON LED HER UNIT
of nine subordinates through the forests surrounding the Fort. The woods were surprisingly quiet considering the bombastic escape the Italian Mob had engineered earlier. Any animals would be still in shelter from the earlier storm or scared off by the sound of humans marching along. She held point as they made their way over the rough terrain, hoping to catch up with the villains on foot. There would be a fair number of Enforcers patrolling the edge of the forest to block their avenue of escape, and it was up to her and her force to keep the villains moving toward the waiting guards.

No one spoke for a while, more concerned with the simple task of following the relatively obvious trail that had been left behind for them. The escaping villains were wounded, disoriented, and more intent on freedom than covering their movements, making tracking them through the wilderness simple. The only problem would be that, by now, some of them would have a tenuous grip of their abilities back, but they would cross that bridge when they came upon it.

She felt the cold hit her like a hammer, the insistent drop in temperature penetrating both her body armor and the inner lining. Her skin prickled, and before she even processed the cold working its way into her bones, steam gushed from her mouth as she exhaled, shooting out in two directions from her assault mask before vanishing into the darkness. Seconds after that, her eyepiece fogged up, then frosted over. It didn’t take long for her breathing mask to clog with ice. Panicking, she ripped it off her head.

Brown hair collapsed messily to her shoulders as she threw the useless thing to the ground. The thunk of other masks and grunts of disgust signaled that her unit was having the same problem. She brought a hand up to her earpiece, trying to hold back a rapid, inexplicable, and growing fear.

“Beta unit, do you read?” The sister squad remained silent. “Delta unit, do you copy?” Delta did not respond.

“Sergeant, the fog!” one of her team members stuttered. She looked up. Sure enough, a wave of fog rolled aggressively toward them, hitting their unit without the slightest bit of force, but overtaking their senses. It was thick, cold, and made it hard to breathe, but it was still typical fog. Leamon felt her heart thunder in her chest. She
hoped
it was typical fog.

One of her men shook, terrified, pointing his automatic rifle rapidly back and forth in the fog bank. Fear had worked its way into his brain, making him try harder to see through the fog but lowering his ability to actually concentrate. “She’s here,” he kept whispering, loud enough for the others to hear.

“Stay together!” Leamon barked. The unit pulled together with the exception of the whispering private. He kept muttering as the trees noisily wafted in the wind. The fog briefly relented, and they were still surrounded by the barren trees and nothing else. Their slender limbs dangled down limply, like arms too lazy to reach out and grasp their prey. “We need to move–”

The crunch of the private hitting the ground interrupted her orders, his half-yelp of shock providing the punctuation. Leamon shouted the moment he hit the ground and sprinted after him as he was dragged through the dirt toward a distant tree. He was screaming, sobbing, before being choked off, his last sound a gurgle before a wet pop ended his protests. With that, he stopped moving. Sergeant Leamon caught up with him at the base of a tree and knelt by his side. She gently rolled his head back, his eyes not meeting hers. Rather, they twitched wildly, glazed, as blood dribbled from his mouth.

He was smiling.

“Sarge!” someone called behind her, the remaining unit raising their rifles.

She looked up, just now noticing the branches…
no, something else… vines, maybe…
entering her vision. She was knocked away with a flick of one of them, the slippery coldness biting into her face and leaving an oily, dirty feeling that overshadowed the force of the blow. There was something else in the physical touch… a feeling of complete isolation… dread.

She stopped when she crashed into a tree, her back cracking loudly against it. Disoriented, she winced at the roaring pops of rifle fire erupting from the other eight members of her unit. She looked up from her prone position.

The fog actually seemed to illuminate the monstrosity, a writhing mass of tentacles. Four of the snaking limbs slammed into the earth, kicking up dirt and needles as it went, propelling the rest of the mass toward her men. They continued to focus their assault on the thing, some backing away as it closed the distance between them. Two black, slimy tendrils lashed out, grabbed the nearest Enforcer, and wrapped around his arm and torso. With a twist, his gun arm was removed and he was casually tossed aside.