Cascade box set 2, p.57
Cascade Box Set 2, page 57
Brad took out the bottle of thirty-year-old whiskey, together with two plastic beakers and poured a small amount of the golden liquid into them. He handed one to Zach. “I have to admit, I was surprised when I heard she wasn’t returning.”
“She will, there are just things she needs to take care of in Boston.”
Brad nodded. “And how you holding up?”
It was a question Zach wasn’t prepared for and he fumbled looking for a response which felt right.
Brad smiled. “It’s not a trick question Zach.”
He took a sip of his whiskey. “Ask me again once the Hulathen are gone.”
“Oh right, that reminds me. You went into space. Boy what I wouldn’t have given to have been there with you.”
“Be careful what you wish for.”
“Ha, that’s very true.” Brad sipped his drink.
“What about you?”
Brad leaned against the drawers. “I’m doing okay. Helps having all these people here. Keeps me occupied. That’s one of the upsides.” He smiled.
Zach finished his drink. “Which one of these rooms had a spare bed again?”
“Turn right, down the hall then the second to last door. Not the last door! That’s Paige’s room. I think she shot the last man who accidentally walked in there.”
Zach smiled. “She seems someone who’s got their head straight about all of this.”
“She’s also a Cascader. Highest ranked at the camp down south.”
Zach raised his eyebrows then put the beaker down. “Thanks for the drink.”
Walking as quietly as he could he made his way down the corridor until he got to the second to last door. He glanced at the last one and smiled then opened the one he had been directed too.
Immediately the air vibrated with the sound of a man snoring, but Zach was too exhausted to care and he quickly threw his boots and pants off and laid down…
His eyes flickered open. Not quite knowing where he was he sat up into darkness and heaving breathing from across the room. A flashing light caught his attention to his left, getting to his feet he stumbled across the room to get to the window. He sighed in relief. It was just one of the outposts external lights swaying in the wind.
Walking back to his bed he picked up his watch. 5:40 a.m. He had had five hours of sleep and didn’t remember any of it. Guess I slept well. Putting his watch on, as well as his pants, shirt and boots he quietly left the room to the snoring man and walked onto the landing. The generators rattled and chortled outside, but the inside of the house was relatively quiet. He walked down the stairs and into the kitchen. Light from outside allowed him to see just enough and he picked up a glass from the worktop. A voice in the darkness almost made him drop it.
“You get any sleep,” said Fiona.
“Err, I think so. Don’t really remember much after touching the pillow.” His eyes started to adjust and he could see her sitting at the table they were eating on hours earlier. “I take it you couldn’t.” He grabbed another glass and poured water from a jug into both.
“Nightmares.”
He walked over and sat on the table next to her, putting her glass down in front of her. “I’d be surprised if you didn’t have them.” He gently put his hand on her shoulder.
She put her hand on his but continued looking off into the dark outside the dining room’s windows. “You never really know how unforgiving the world is until you’ve had hope.”
He removed his hand. “There’s still hope. We got through the Cascade and we’ll get through the Hulathen.”
“Sure, but what will it cost us?” She looked up at him.
He took in a deep breath. “I gotta believe that whatever it does cost, would have been worth it. We’re not just fighting for ourselves, we’re fighting for everyone,” he smiled. “Even now the E.L.F’s.”
“I should get some sleep.”
“If you want to share a room with a large guy who snores, the second to last room in the left corridor is the place to be.”
She drank the water in one go, got to her feet, kissed him on his cheek and left the kitchen.
As she did, Brad came the other way. “I thought I heard voices.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
Brad raised his hand. “Nah, I was just laying there anyway, thinking about those aliens you so vividly described.”
“I think it’s best we make our way to the camp as soon as we can. Sometime today probably.”
“That soon?”
“I’ve been away from there for too long.” He sighed. The idea of moving even further away from Boston weighed on him, but his instincts were telling him he was needed elsewhere.
“I can understand that. Well in that case, there’s something else I haven’t had chance to mention, and that’s we got the airstrip up and functioning that’s near here.”
“Didn’t exactly have a fun time last time I was there.”
“Ha, yeah well, with the help of the Cascaders the E.L.F’s weren’t a problem, and for the past week we have been bringing in supplies on a daily basis. In fact there’s a supply plane due in tomorrow. No reason why you can’t be on it when it returns.”
*****
“And this is the new vehicle hanger slash bunker in case we need it to be.” Brad stood in front of fifteen-foot high double steel secured doors which were slid back to reveal two rows of Humvee’s as well as green crates piled high against the walls.
Zach looked around the cavernous space that was partially built into the ground. “Looks secure.”
“And that’s pretty much everything. I hope I get a good report when you see Trow.”
“With the amount of stuff she’s sending up here, I don’t think you need anymore praise from me.”
“Next phase is the nearby town. There’s a lot of buildings there that were untouched and we could do a lot with them.”
“There’s also less E.L.F’s around than there used to be…”
“Yeah it’s a funny thing. These monsters killed… well everyone and now I have this feeling like we need to protect them—”
“Like they’re still part of the planet.”
Brad removed his cap, scratched his head then put it back on. “Yeah. Without the Cascaders we’re still be screwed though. If the aliens kidnap or whatever it is they want to do to them, then humans go back to being on the menu again.”
“That’s why I need to get back to the camp, try and stop that from being the outcome.”
Brad briefly looked around like he was looking for someone. “How’s Fiona? I’ve not really had a chance to talk to her about what happened to Cal…”
“She’s—” Zach sighed. “—Doing as well as can be expected. I think going back to the camp will be hard for her, but necessary.”
Brad patted Zach on the shoulder. “Let’s get things ready for that trip—” He briefly looked at where the sun was in sky. “Reckon we got another hour before the planes due in.”
CHAPTER FORTY
Abbey’s hands gripped the cold metal of the ladder to the surface and pulled herself up and out onto the concrete to the street.
A cool wind brushed past her making her shiver. She looked at the ruins around her and quickly spotted the object that was out of place. Hovering some fifty feet from the ground was a cuboid dark box, covered in veins that glowed. Spanning some forty feet square on its top and bottom sides it looked like a small structure just hanging in the sky.
Elcher was standing beneath it while a shaft of light from the craft above lit the ground in front of him. Some way back sitting around a small fire that nestled amongst some ruins, four soldiers talked and laughed.
Wrapping her arms around herself to keep warm, she walked over the loose bricks and debris until she was alongside the alien. From this new perspective she could see he was tapping away at the wall of light, as if he was operating a computer.
“What you doing?” she said.
“Working.”
“I can see that. On what?”
“Trying to shield my signature here, so not to draw more Hulathen to this location.”
She bent her neck and looked up at the daunting looking ship looming above them. “That your…ship?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“The general was right, you do talk in riddles.”
Elcher stopped what he was doing and looked down at her. “The less your species know of what is beyond your planet the better.”
Abbey looked about her, finding a small piece of wall and sat on it.
Elcher went to start his work again, but stopped. “It is not your fault.”
“What isn’t?” As the words left her mouth she wondered why she bothered talking them, she knew perfectly well what he was referring too.
“The Cascade. You believe because of an insertion of a computer program into your country’s satellite system, that then caused the devastation of your planet.”
She looked down. “If I hadn’t—”
“When it’s true to say that your action did lead the Hulathen to this region of space, it is not true to state that what you did then caused what happened next. It did not. The genes that triggered the Cascade virus were planted in your species many millennia ago by the ancestors of the Hulathen and the probabilities that the virus would be triggered with or without the actions of an outside species were still quite high. I hope that allays your fears of the role you think you played.” He went back to tapping and swiping.
Abbey just looked and stared at the back of his head. She wasn’t sure if she felt better or not. She had answers and maybe that was enough.
“So what are the chances—”
She stopped, seeing that Elcher was intently watching a part of the screen made of light that was flashing. “What is it?”
“I was too late.”
Abbey stood. “Too late? What do you mean?”
“They are coming.”
Abbey anxiously looked up at the sky. Some of the soldiers started getting to their feet. “When? Here? How long—”
“No, not here.”
*****
High above the fields and forests of northeastern Texas Zach, Fiona and the others sat inside a steel tube, strapped into their seats and trying to ignore the turbulence and roar of the plane’s engines.
Each occupant was lost in their own memories of the last time they were at the camp, and what had transpired since.
Zach tried not to think about how once again he was separated from Abbey, and instead focused his thoughts on how he was going to start a program to expand the bunkers under the metropolis. He was also curious how the E.L.F’s were being used for work purposes.
Fiona looked out of the side window of the transport plane at the beige and brown fields beneath them, and thought about the man she still loved. For most of the past few weeks she had been able to crush any memories of Cal, but now, knowing she was just thirty minutes out from the camp’s airport, images of him kept forcing their way into her mind. A tear began to run down her cheek which she quickly wiped away hoping no one else had seen.
The plane’s cabin bumped making everyone grip their harnesses.
“Man, I hate—”
Before Michael could finish the world inside the plane tilted violently to the left. A beeping noise started playing out around them together with the white lights that were on, switching to red. The cabin then returned to level.
“What the hell’s going on?” Shouted Miles.
Fiona’s attention was drawn back to her window. “No…” Sparkles of white were just visible on the horizon. “Look out of the windows!” She shouted to the others.
Zach undid his harness and walked up the steps and knocked on the pilot’s cabin door. “What’s going on?” he shouted through the door, which promptly opened. One of pilots quickly returned back to their seats.
Zach staggered forward as the turbulence buffeted the plane and was about to ask what the issue was, when he saw it for himself. A few miles ahead of them the sky was full of streams of neon red swiping across the sky, while cones of intense light, plainly visible against the clouds, shone down to the ground. The camps silver walls which they were passing over lit up with explosions, and even from the altitude they were at, he could make out blue-purple points of light which he knew to be the Hulathen on the ground.
All while he watched what was unfolding at their destination, the captain was trying to reach the control tower.
“They’re here…” said Fiona just behind Zach.
The captain briefly looked over his shoulder. “You should all go back and strap in, I don’t know what the integrity of the landing strip is going to be—”
A streak of light zipped past them moving in the same direction they were, and an instant after a bright flash lit up the cabin, followed by a pressure wave which knocked Zach and Fiona into the cabins walls. Warning sounds filled the air.
They looked out of the side window to see flames billowing out of the left engine.
“Strap in! We’re going down!”
The End.
BOOK
CHAPTER ONE
Sam Coleman ducked down behind a tree and clicked on his radio. “We can see the smoke, you on fourteenth Street yet? Over.”
Other members of the camp’s justice force stayed close to the ground nearby, eyeing the streets of the downtown area around them suspiciously. The sound of explosions and gunfire rang out in the distance.
No response came from Sam’s radio.
“Isaiah? Your team there yet? Over.”
The sound of battle burst from his radio, causing him to fumble for the volume, quickly turning it down.
“Yeah, just on fourteenth! We’re taking heavy fire from one of those purple fucks, we might have to fall back. Over!”
“Just distract them, long enough for us to—”
A droning sound made him and his squad look to the sky as a black rectangular craft slid across the sky between the skyscrapers above them. They all ducked lower, waiting for it to pass.
“Shit, it’s moving towards the smoke,” said a grime faced woman with her light brown hair in a ponytail.
They watched the alien sky machine seemingly unaffected by wind or air resistance relentlessly move towards the site of the crashed military plane. They all wished it would change course and then in a blink of an eye it did, speeding off to the west.
Everyone let out a breath.
Sam stood. “That’s our cue, lets get moving.” He glanced at his M4 rifle, then at the newly opened shops around him. They were built into the bottom of the numerous skyscrapers that had been constructed, and already contained goods that only the elite of the camp could afford.
He and his six person squad, were one of six teams who were the closest to the plane when it careered along Main street, eventually coming to a stop in one of the city’s green plaza’s.
Initially the Hulathen who were attacking the camp seemed uninterested in the plane, but that now seemed to be changing, and only his and Isaiah’s squad were finding it possible to make any progress towards saving those that might still be alive onboard.
Sam’s squad ran to one of the many four way junctions in the built up part of the city. A loud smash made them all point their guns to their left. A small group of young men were kicking in a glass shop front, and grabbing the items of clothing that were on display.
“Should I go over and give them a talking to Cap?” said a burly looking man to Sam.
He shook his head. “Bigger fish and all that.” He looked down the length of the street at the wreckage of the plane, one of its wings sheared off and the fuselage sitting at a tilt. One of the engines was still burning.
They ran forward moving around a haphazardly parked car and continued along the sidewalk.
“Look!” said the ponytailed woman, looking above them. One of the gun towers, the size of a bus was hanging off the side of its pillar, eighteen floors up.
They kept running towards the plane.
“Eye on the prize, Baxter,” said Sam.
Skipping over restaurant chairs and tables laying scattered Sam tried to concentrate on rescuing whoever he could from the burning wreck two hundred yards from him and pushed the thoughts of Mary and the kids out of his mind.
I checked on them thirty minutes ago, they’re fine.
They came to a shuddering halt at the final junction, which allowed a complete view of the devastation. Trees laid splintered and broken and flames burned on patches of aircraft fuel across the furrowed grass. A wing lay in the road, with a pile of masonry on top of it, and in the center of the small park sat the rest of the plane, almost obscured by the black bellowing smoke that was floating skywards from the other wings engine.
Sam looked at two of his squad. “Jenkins and Flores, each take a different side of the park, and see if there are any survivors that have made their way in those directions, and keep an eye on the street where you are.” He then switched to the tallest of the group. “Fisher, get up in one of these buildings and give me overwatch.” Finally he turned to the two who were left, Boe and Joan. “Let’s see who’s still alive, and watch out for the burning fuel.”
They all ran across the junction, jumping over pieces of plane and park benches. A loud distant explosion made them all flick their heads to west, then back to the fuselage. One of the passengers was lying on the ground. Even though they were face down, Sam instantly recognized it as Zach. The ponytailed woman ran to him, and carefully turned him over. Boe continued running to the back of the plane.
“Is he…” said Sam not wanting an answer.
Joan Baxter felt for Zach’s pulse. “He’s alive, strong pulse—” She undid the strap of Zach’s helmet and pulled it off, as she did, he started to move, then suddenly his arms flailed around.
“What? Where—”
Sam kneeled. “Zach’s it’s me, Sam.”
Zach looked at the woman and man next to him, without recognizing them for a moment, then looked back at the plane. He then tried to get to his feet.
