Extinction Evolution (The Extinction Cycle Book 4)
Read Extinction Evolution (The Extinction Cycle Book 4) Online
Authors: Nicholas Sansbury Smith
Extinction Cycle, Book IV
Nicholas Sansbury Smith
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Copyright October 2015 by Nicholas Sansbury Smith
All Rights Reserved
Cover Design by Creative Paramita
Edited by Aaron Sikes and Erin Elizabeth Long
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.
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Strong, brave and heroic—thank you for your service.
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Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.
—Charles Darwin
-Prologue-
M
arine Staff Sergeant Jose Garcia flipped his night vision goggles into position and watched as the half dozen outlines of the
George Washington
Carrier Strike Group grew distant. That was home now. Had been since the Hemorrhage Virus outbreak started over a month ago. The
GW
was the last intact strike group in the world, with two Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers, two Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers, a submarine tender, a Clark-class dry cargo ship, and a Pathfinder-class oceanographic survey ship. The strike group was the best and last chance the American military had of stopping the Variants.
Garcia’s six-man Force Recon team cruised over the choppy waters of the Florida Keys in a nimble Zodiac. Somewhere to the east, the
USS Emory S. Land
submarine lurked beneath the waves. He couldn’t see her, but he knew she was out there.
Thin clouds rolled across a jeweled sky of brilliant stars. Out here he could almost forget the world was gone, but then the memories would surface and remind him of the truth.
As the green-hued shapes of the
GW
Strike Group disappeared on the horizon, thoughts of Garcia’s family worked their way into his mind. His wife Ashley, his daughter, Leslie: they were gone now, like most of the world, nothing but flakes of ash in the cloud of death that had swept across the landscape.
Shit wasn’t supposed to go down this way. He was supposed to be rocking his six-month-old baby girl to sleep on the porch of his country home in North Carolina, listening to the peaceful chirp of crickets at dusk. It was the home he and his wife had always dreamed of. The type of place you could only get to by back roads. Where no one bothered you. He had been going to retire there—raise his family, maybe keep some horses.
Garcia gripped his suppressed M4 and ground his teeth together. All he had left of his wife and daughter was the picture taped to the inside of his helmet, leaving him nothing but a shattered dream of what could have been.
Modern warfare had taught him there were lines
most
men wouldn’t cross. There were international laws against torture, rules that governed war. Courtesies that allowed the enemy to clear the injured off a field after a battle. But when was the last time the enemy passed up a chance to kill America’s soldiers? War against the Variants was no different. Garcia had served in the Corps for twenty years and seen some awful things—real-life nightmares. He had faced Al Qaeda and the Taliban in The War on Terror, enemies that lacked all aspects of humanity. He thought he knew what monsters were, until he came face to face with the Variants.
This new enemy followed no rules and shared no courtesies. The human race was fighting tooth and nail for its very existence. He knew the value of life and how easily it could be taken away. The only respite in the dread that owned him now was his faith in God. He knew he would see his family again. Until then his plan was simple: fight and die well.
Garcia wasn’t the only one suffering. Every man on the Zodiac had lost someone. He flipped up his NVGs to conserve battery and took a moment to scan his team. Their faces were all covered by camouflage and shadow, but Garcia didn’t need to see their features to know they were ready for whatever came next.
Sergeant Rick Thomas and Corporal Jimmy Daniels sat on the portside with their suppressed M4s angled toward the water. Like Garcia, they both had olive skin, short cropped hair, and dark mustaches. Garcia privately thought they looked like a couple of old-school porn stars with those mustaches. Knowing Thomas and Daniels, they’d probably take it as a compliment.
On the starboard side sat Corporal Steve “Stevo” Holmes. He was a quiet man with an honest face, Dumbo ears, and an M249 SAW with an AAC silencer cradled across his chest. In the stern, Lance Corporal Jeff Morgan and Corporal Ryan “Tank” Talon manned the motor. Morgan carried a suppressed MK11. He was thin, fast, and agile—the reasons Garcia had assigned him as point man. Tank, on the other hand, was a hulking African-American with lumberjack arms and a barrel chest. The team’s radio operator, he carried a suppressed M4.
These were the Marines of the team codenamed The Variant Hunters, or VH for short. Some scientist ten times smarter than Garcia had jokingly called them the Monster Squad, but Garcia didn’t like that. Sounded too much like a B-movie.
Tonight, their mission wasn’t to exterminate Variants. It was simply to locate and observe the monsters in Key West. Recent intel indicated they were changing, maybe even evolving, at alarming rates. Garcia’s role was to confirm this and document how,
scientifically
, the beasts were adapting.
Fuck science.
He didn’t give a shit about what mutations the Variants were undergoing or what the lab jockeys were doing to stop it. He had his own cure—an M4 with a magazine full of 5.56 mm rounds. Each engraved with the initials of his daughter and wife.
Waves slapped against the sides of the Zodiac as they shot toward Key West. Garcia’s senses were on full alert, taking in all his surroundings: the salty scent of the warm water on the breeze, the hum of the Zodiac’s motor. The dull buzz of excitement pumped through his veins and made the spray of water on his skin sting.
On the horizon, the islands came into focus. He held up a hand to motion for Tank to ease up on the engine. They coasted until they were five hundred feet out.
Their final gear preps made little sound over the choppy waves. Garcia dismantled his NVGs and put the optics in a cascade bag. He stuffed it into his main pack and sat on the starboard side of the boat to put on his fins. Before he put on his scuba mask, he said, “Radio discipline when we get shore side. Keep an eye out for anything on the way in. You all know those freaks can swim.”
There were five nods, then Morgan dropped backward into the water with a plop. The others followed, one by one, with Garcia diving last.
As soon as he was submerged, he pulled his blade and finned after the others. The Marines broke off into pairs and fell into a modified sidestroke, their heads just above the water.
Garcia couldn’t see shit. There was always a small stab of fear that came with the underwater darkness. As a kid, he’d hated swimming in murky lakes. When he enlisted in the Marines, that fear mostly subsided but never totally went away. Knowing the Variants could swim didn’t help.
All it takes is all you got, Marine.
The motto always helped remind him what he was made of. How much he could take. Mental and physical pain were just temporary distractions. He took in a breath every other stroke, and glided through the choppy water with ease. Every hundred feet he took a second to sight, scanning the water and island beyond for contacts. They were halfway to Smathers Beach, where the branches of palm trees shifted in a slight breeze.
When they reached the surf, Garcia stood and unstrapped his backpack. He retrieved his NVGs, changed into his gear, clipped his fins to his bag, and jammed a magazine into his M4 while Daniels held security. Then they switched. The other men were all doing the same. Garcia used the stolen minutes to scope the terrain.
The pink Sheraton Hotel towered over Nathan Lester Highway beyond the beach. Derelict cars were scattered across the road. Umbrellas and plastic chairs jutted out of the sand in every direction like unexploded missiles. A gust of wind sent trash shifting across the ground. The entire beach looked like a war zone.
“Sarge,” Daniels said over the comm. “You see that?”