Orbs (24 page)

Timothy froze. They weren't looking at him; they were looking behind him.

Scratch, scrape, scratch, scrape.

“Oh God.” He turned his head to see the two missing Spiders from the video feed. One of the creatures hung from the ceiling, where a loose panel dangled freely. The other continued to slide across the concrete floor, its claws scratching. Its compound eyes scanned them, and Timothy had the horrible feeling that it was deciding which of them to eat first.

He took a step back—a mistake, it turned out. The Spider seemed to finalize its analysis, and Timothy was clearly on the menu.

He closed his eyes and waited for the Spider to tear into him. But his right eye wouldn't stay shut. The nervous twitch had returned, just in time for him to watch the claws descend.

The tunnel was dim, illuminated only by a few emergency lights. One flickered intermittently, reminding Overton of the red lights from the railway crossing in his hometown. Like a subliminal warning, the light blinked on and off, on and off. It shed an eerie glow over an idle escalator at the end of the passage. It was as if they were being warned to stay out of the tunnel.

Overton ignored the superstitious thought and secured the RVM on his back before leaping over the security lever at the top of the escalator. He began the descent into the darkness, blinking to enhance his night vision.

The green glow of the goggles' night vision bled across his HUD, revealing zero contacts. All he could see was the vague outline of a metal gate at the bottom of the stairs.

Footsteps sounded behind him as he made his way down the metal teeth of the escalator. He didn't risk turning to check on Sophie, for fear of tripping and falling.

A few moments later he reached the bottom of the escalator. With a simple push, the entry door creaked halfway open. He frowned at the sound echoing off the tunnel walls.

The noise was loud enough that any living thing within close proximity would hear them coming. Several strained heartbeats later, the noise vanished, and he slipped through the gateway. The main corridor was similar to the one that led to the Biosphere facility. It had been drilled with a “mole,” or tunnel-boring machine. Only a TBM left behind such smooth walls.

Overton checked the tunnel. His HUD again blinked clear of heat signatures.

“It's clear,” he said. A moment later, Sophie caught up with him.

With a nod she paced down the passage, shoulder to shoulder with Overton. At some point she'd grown rather fond of the brusque Marine. Without realizing when it had happened, they had become a team.

The image of an idle train filled their displays as they rounded the corner. It rested on the tracks like a sleeping beast. Overton stared at the relic from the past; it had been years since he had ridden on a train. A pair of red emergency lights glowed above the front car door, illuminating the symbol of the NSA. Overton approached the train, jamming his combat knife between the car doors.

“Help me,” he said. Working together, they pried the door open and slipped inside the empty train. It was littered with debris—rusted metal fuel barrels, a pair of rubber tires stacked neatly on top of one another, and a plastic container filled with tools.

“Looks like someone's used this train since it was decommissioned,” Overton said.

Sophie shrugged, making her way past the barrels and into the conductor's car. She guessed several airport employees who knew about
the facility would have brought their families to the tunnel during the solar storms. She'd harbored a faint hope that they might have done so again, but she saw no sign of recent habitation. She checked her HUD for a radiation reading. It was fairly high—high enough to keep survivors out of the tunnel. There was little chance of running into any humans.

Overton pushed his way into the tiny car and peered over Sophie's shoulder, studying the gears. “Well, do you know how to run this thing?”

Sophie pushed a red button on the middle of the console, and a row of lights flickered on. He patted her on the back and slipped back into the second car, taking a seat on one of the dusty benches. His stomach was growling and his throat was parched. It had been several hours since he'd had any nutrition, and a couple seconds without his helmet wasn't going to kill him.

“Hold on to your seat, Sergeant. If I'm correct, this train can reach a maximum of three hundred miles per hour. That should put us at White Sands in a little over two hours.”

Overton took several gulps from his canteen, letting the warm water glide down his throat. “Let's get this show on the road,” he said, and tore open an energy bar.

The floor of the train groaned and creaked as the electric engine flared to life. He slipped his helmet back on and closed his eyes, chewing the last bit of chocolate before resting his helmeted head on the glass window. By the time the train had reached full speed, he was asleep.

The creature's mandibles split and its head darted forward, straining the Spider's thin neck as it lunged for Timothy. Oddly, in that moment of terror and confusion, he fixated on the waft of breath coming from the thing's gaping mouth. It was odorless.

Ever since he was a child, he had imagined what monsters would be like. He thought they would have the most disgusting, raunchiest breath possible, the scent of death and decay rolling off their tongues.
It was a prerequisite for dungeon-dwelling beasts.

In the moment before his death, he realized this was no make-believe monster. It was a real, honest-to-God alien life-form, so different from anything his youthful brain had ever created. He didn't have time to comprehend what that meant, if anything.

There wasn't much pain, just a short, hot explosion behind his eyes as the creature sank its sharp teeth into his head. Timothy's legs folded beneath his limp body. The other Organic rushed up behind its friend and lunged with several of its claws, raising the man's corpse into the air. They began spinning him into a blue web.

By the time Bouma and Emanuel arrived, Timothy was already covered in the glowing substance. Bouma sprinted down the passageway with his pulse rifle clanging against the shoulder of his armor.

He halted several yards away, skidding to a dead stop as his mind grasped the gravity of the situation. A slew of eyeballs stared back at him. The Spiders both tilted their heads and let out high pitched shrieks.

“Run! Take the kids and hide!” Bouma managed to scream over the intermittent screeching of the monsters.

He resisted the urge to check whether Emanuel, Holly, and the children were following his orders. Instead, he did what he was trained to do: neutralize the threat.

With one swift motion, he raised the barrel of his rifle, steadied his breathing the best he could, and squeezed down on the trigger. He knew he had little chance of lowering their shields without an electromagnetic concussion grenade, but he had no choice.

To his surprise, the rounds tore into the creatures' flesh, sending limbs and grotesque eyeballs in all directions. The exploding bodies splattered the walls with glowing blue blood, like a drunken artist spray-painting with glitter.

Bouma emptied the magazine into the Spiders. He wanted to be sure—he
had
to be sure they were dead. After studying the mess from a distance, he finally stepped toward the scene. Slowly, he lowered his rifle and removed the empty clip, grabbing another one from his belt and jamming it into the weapon. Trying to still his labored breath, he
took one knee.

He pulled out his tablet from a pouch on his back and accessed the defense system to check the records. He studied the lines of code running across the display. Something was amiss. The sensors had picked up the Organics, but only when they had entered the hallway minutes earlier. For some reason the defense mechanism had never kicked in to warn the team of their presence. Which meant it was possible there were still more of them lurking in the ceiling.

Bouma made the mistake of studying the gore. His stomach lurched. Protruding out of the mixture of human and Organic blood was Timothy's face, his features warped at a terrifying angle. He forced himself to look away. There was nothing he could do for the man now.

He shouldered his rifle and retreated into the mess hall. His first objective was to secure the civilians. The next objective terrified him. After ensuring their safety, he was going to have to crawl through the ducts to root out any remaining creatures.

The image of Finley's and Saafi's burning remains flickered in his mind. He tried to blink it away, but it was replaced with the faces of comrades from his old squad, and finally the sweet face of his baby nephew.

He pulled back the lever on his pulse rifle barrel. A loud, metallic click rang out as the first round entered the chamber. If there were any of the aliens left, he was going to find them. And he was going to kill every last one of them.

CHAPTER 28

T
HE
ancient train groaned and creaked, slowing to a stop. Sophie nudged Overton's leg. “We're here.”

He blinked the sleep out of his eyes. Throwing his rifle strap over his shoulder, he grabbed one of the hand railings and hoisted himself up. Stars raced across his eyes, and he was forced to sit back down. The poor sleep, lack of food, and the loss of his squad had finally caught up to him.

“Shit,” he said, smacking his helmet with his armored hand.

“You all right?” Sophie asked.

“Yeah, perfect. I just have a headache.”

Sophie examined the vestibule of the train station through the grimy windows. The lobby was nothing like the bunker they had entered at the airport. Her night vision revealed the obscure outlines of concrete chunks littered across the ground. The wall had been scored with deep gouges. A sign hung loosely off one of the destroyed pillars. It was speckled with holes, making it difficult to read. After a moment, she made out the sweetest words she'd ever seen:
Welcome to White Sands Missile Range.

“What happened here?” Sophie said, hunching over so she could get a better view of the lobby.

Overton gave his helmet one more smack and strolled over to the glass. He blinked a few times to enhance the optics and focused on the outline of several humps in the corner of the vestibule.

“Those look like bodies,” he said.

A short burst of static broke over the com as Sophie exhaled. “How is that possible?”

“I don't know, but I don't like it. I'm going to check it out. Wait here.”

Overton slipped through the automatic door and stepped out onto the concrete platform. Bringing the scope to his visor, he surveyed the scene, allowing the crosshairs to pop up on his HUD. He crept toward the figures, stepping over the chunks of concrete.

He checked the two corridors for contacts before entering the main lobby. They were empty—nothing but heaps of trash and broken glass. More relics of the past. The vestibule, on the other hand, was filled with signs of recent occupation—and of death. Bodies lay scattered throughout the room. Everywhere his eyes fell, the outlines of armored corpses filled his display. But there was something odd about them—something wasn't right.

Overton crouched to get a better look. What he saw made him fumble and nearly drop his rifle. The lumps weren't corpses. They were the black matte armor suits NTC soldiers wore in the Wastelands. The same suit he had on now.

The suits were empty. Where were the bodies?

It was clear there had been a battle. The dark craters from plasma rounds and chunks of broken concrete indicated as much. He scanned the room again, this time not for humans but for Organics.

There was no sign of them. No gooey blood, no dismembered limbs. Nothing.

This was no battle—this was a massacre.

He grabbed one of the soldier's fallen rifles and stood. “Sophie, get up here.”

Footsteps rang out behind him immediately, followed by a burst of static over the com and then Sophie's calm voice.

“Where are the bodies?”

“That's exactly what I've been wondering.” Overton paused, scanning the room one more time. His instincts reasserted themselves and he began to move cautiously forward, motioning Sophie toward the edge of the stairs leading into the facility.

“Alexia, you still alive in there?” Overton asked.

“Yes, Sergeant. I'm still 90 percent functional.”

“Good. I'm going to need you to upload the facility's blueprint to our HUDs.”

“One moment, sir.”

Seconds later a rectangular box popped up in the corner of their displays, followed by two tiny red dots representing their location.

“Where's
Secundo Casu
?” Sophie asked.

“I am sorry, Dr. Winston, but unfortunately the blueprints to which I have access are outdated. White Sands is the largest decommissioned military installation in the United States, and—”

“Cut to the chase, Alexia,” Overton growled. “If you had to take a guess, where do you think NTC would have housed our Noah's Ark?”

Another red dot appeared on their HUDs. Underneath it was a single number representing the distance to the potential location.

“That's five miles away from here, Sophie!”

“What? You expected the bus to take you right to the front door? This isn't elementary school, this is the big leagues now,” Sophie chuckled.

“That's cute, really it is, but look around. The Organics beat us here! NTC beat us here! And that means
Secundo Casu
could be fucked!”

“We need to take a step back and focus on what we know. One, the RVM will protect us as long as the Organics don't see us moving. Two, we have already made it over seven hundred miles. The hard part is over.”

Overton tossed Sophie one of the pulse rifles he had picked up. “Take this; you're going to need it.”

She caught it gracefully and threw the strap around her back. With one more glance at the empty armor, she began the ascent up the staircase.

The connecting floor was pitch black. There were no red emergency lights here, just the darkness. The green glow of her night vision was beginning to make her dizzy. And with nothing to look at besides a jungle of wire and piping along the walls and ceiling, she was beginning to feel claustrophobic, too.

Sophie halted to take a deep breath. She was fatigued, hungry, and most of all, thirsty. It was possible her mind was beginning to play tricks on her.

“I'm taking five,” she said in a hushed voice.

Overton nodded and turned on his head lamps before unclipping his helmet. A pair of double lights illuminated the tunnel. He set the helmet down and reached for the small pack on his back to retrieve one of his canteens and an energy bar. It only took a minute for him to devour the chocolate and polish off half of the water.

“You better conserve that. We need to save some for the return trip,” Sophie said, chewing her way through a piece of beef jerky.

He scowled in the darkness. His face was hardly recognizable in the faint light, but Sophie caught the look. She held her tongue and decided to ignore her own advice. She finished off the jerky, washing it down with a few long gulps of the precious liquid.

Overton took out his tablet and studied the blueprint. “All right, looks like we're somewhere under the spaceport,” he said, pointing to a horizontal line on the display. “Alexia puts the shuttle's possible location here. Which means we're going to have to go above ground to get to the hangar.”

He looked at the mission clock on his HUD.

12:45 p.m.

“We could wait until it gets dark, but I'm not sure it'll make much difference.”

Sophie shook her head. “Not a chance I'm staying down here for that long.”

Overton grabbed his helmet and hoisted himself off the ground by grabbing onto a pipe, nearly ripping it free from the wall. “Roger that. Let's keep moving.”

They picked up their rifles and continued into the darkness, pushing along the winding tunnels, up stairways, and through countless corridors. Several signs hung from the walls. They were rusted beyond recognition by the steady drip from the leaky pipes lining the ceiling.

Sophie finally knew what it was like to be one of the mice she had seen used in countless experiments. Navigating the tunnels was like
being stuck in a maze—no, a rat trap. Even with the veteran recon Marine and the world's smartest computer as her guides, she was starting to feel lost.

As they rounded a corner, she saw the passage opened up into another vestibule. Her trot turned into a steady jog, and soon she was leading Overton up the stairs into a massive room.

This was different from the vestibule they had entered right off the train. It was larger, with a curved dome, much like Biome 1. The walls were all concrete, with painted arrows pointing at different passages. With the night vision, she couldn't make out the different colors, but she could read them.

HOLLOMAN AIR FORCE BASE 21 MILES

WHITE SANDS TEST FACILITY 14 MILES

SPACEPORT 2¼ MILES

WHITE SANDS POST HEADQUARTERS 13 MILES

“Like Alexia said, this was the biggest military installation in the United States at one time,” Sophie said, preempting any snide comments from Overton regarding the distances.

“We're halfway there. Let's keep moving.”

They hurried into the tunnel labeled “Spaceport.” It was much wider—about three times the diameter of the others, large enough for a vehicle to travel in.

“This tunnel should open up into one last vestibule that leads to the surface,” Alexia said in their earpieces.

“And you really think
Secundo Casu
is going to be waiting for us?” Overton asked.

Silence washed over the com. Sophie had stopped several paces ahead, her figure frozen in the darkness like a statue.

“What is it, Sophie?” Overton continued.

“I think I hear something . . .”

Overton halted and strained his ears. Nothing but the sporadic burst of static over the com filled his helmet.

“I don't—”

A faint metallic sound broke through the silence before he could finish his sentence. He swung his rifle off his back and shouldered it, peering down the tunnel with the scope. The crosshairs on his HUD glowed red as the wireless link synched the weapon with his helmet. He scanned the darkness for signatures but saw nothing.

For several minutes they waited, until the metallic scraping finally faded away.

“It could have been anything,” Overton said, but he knew it was a lie. He was all too familiar with the sound the Spiders made as they moved on their knife-like claws. However, they seemed to be gone for now. There wasn't anything in the passages, save for rusted pipes and corroded wires.

Sophie forced herself forward, hugging the walls close behind Overton. She felt like something was watching her, tailing just behind them in the dark tunnel. Every few seconds she stole a glance over her shoulder to make sure the tunnel was clear.

It wasn't long before they could see a blue light at the other end of the passage. They both blinked off their night vision and halted.

Overton balled his hand into a fist and took one knee. Sophie followed suit, and as if they'd drilled the motion countless times, they raised their rifles in unison and waited—waited for the Spiders to swarm the tunnel and consume them. Even when Sophie's arm grew tired and her gun began to shake and dip, they still held their position.

Finally, after what seemed like hours to Sophie, Overton stood and took a step forward into some sort of sticky goo. He didn't take his eyes off the entrance of the passage—he didn't need to. The substance he had stepped in was the same goo he had all over his armor. It was the blood of an injured Organic.

Which meant the massacre hadn't been as one-sided as he thought. He motioned Sophie to join him with a silent nod and together they advanced toward the blue glow. With every step Sophie grew more anxious, her ears straining to catch a hint of metallic scraping. But the tunnel remained silent; it seemed they were alone.

From their vantage point, Overton could see that the passage opened up into another lobby. It was filled with orbs; too many to
count. And hanging from the ceiling were dozens of Spiders.

Overton froze. Fear gripped him and prodded him to run, to retreat, but he remained still. If Sophie was right, the creatures could sense movement even with their senses confused by the RVM. It was the one advantage he had, and he wasn't about to blow it because he was scared.

From behind the safety of his visor, his eyes darted back and forth, examining the room. It was completely open, with only a few concrete pillars to hide behind. A single stairway led to a set of metal doors. The glass was smudged with dirt and dust, but several rays of bright sunlight filtered in, turning the orbs closest to it a fluorescent green. They reminded Overton of the ornaments his mother used to decorate their Christmas tree with when he was a kid.

The contents of the orbs, however, prevented any warm or fuzzy childhood memories from returning. Over half of the spheres had split open, their prisoners fully liquefied. The floor was littered with sacks of skin and remnants of clothes. He took a step back into the tunnel, his stomach rolling.

From Sophie's perspective, his body appeared to be split in two by the light, with half of his matte black armor exposed in the room and the other half hidden in darkness. She tiptoed up to him, catching a glimpse of what had made him retreat. Overton tapped her on the side of her helmet quietly, getting her attention. With one slow movement of his hand he pointed to the pillars closest to them, then to the staircase, and then back to his visor.

She managed a thumbs-up, took a deep breath, and followed him into the room. Everywhere her eyes fell, death stared back. But at the bottom of the stairs, one sphere's contents were still mostly intact, and, to Sophie's horror—still alive.

She slowed her pace to study the gaunt face of what had been a young woman. The greenish glow from the night vision illuminated the girl's distorted features. Her eyes were almost completely glazed over.

Her lips were curled back, showcasing a mouthful of missing teeth. The skin of her face was sunken and stretched, and her blond hair was plastered to her skull like seaweed.

Sophie froze when the woman's eyes came to rest on her. Overton
was already a third of the way up the stairs, but Sophie couldn't move. There had to be something she could do—some way she could help the girl.

A short burst of static broke over the com. “Move, Doc.”

Sophie didn't need to look up to see Overton staring down at her from the top of the stairs. She willed her legs to move, but they wouldn't respond.

I can't leave her. Not like this.