Chapter 1
“Sergeant Card, sitrep!”
The voice came in loud and harsh through the comm in Sergeant Caleb Card’s helmet. He didn’t expect anything less from Lieutenant Jones. He was all business in the best of times, and these were anything but the best of times.
Caleb didn’t answer right away. His response was interrupted when a demon burst out of a broken window beside him and his squad, lunging through the air toward Corporal Banks on his left. Caleb was the first to notice the attempted ambush, and he spun lightly on his heels, bringing his carbine to bear and firing. The slugs hit the demon in the chest, the impact knocking it off course and onto the street.
It didn’t move again.
“Thanks for the save, Sarge,” Corporal Banks said.
Caleb glanced down at the dead creature. They all called them demons, but they weren’t. At least, Command said they weren’t. They looked like demons, with sharp features and oily black flesh, like horror-movie bats that had lost their wings and grown spindly arms and legs that ended in razor-sharp claws. The damn things were light as bats too, their bones hollow and delicate, allowing them to jump around like they were on a trampoline.
It also made them pretty easy to kill. It was just too bad there were so damn many of them.
“Card!” Lieutenant Jones snapped again. “Sitrep!”
“Sir, we’re…” Caleb paused, looking around and then at the map on the heads-up display appearing on the inside of his helmet visor. The streets all looked the same. The buildings all looked the same. Everything looked the same. Ripped and torn apart, broken and beaten, strewn with rubble, debris and bodies. Everywhere he went, there were bodies. So many and so often he hardly noticed them as anything more than a fixture of the modern landscape.
The street was a snapshot of Earth in general. It didn’t matter which city they were in. New York, Chicago, Paris, London, Moscow. Everywhere was the same. Chaos, destruction and death. So much death that corpse-ridden streets had become the new normal.
Walking through this street at this time of day with this group of men and women? That was the strange thing.
He noticed a nearby wall, half crumbled. Red spray paint coated the marred surface.
SCREW THE XENOTRIFE!
He could get behind that. Screw the xenotrife.
“We’re half a klick from the target and closing,” Caleb finished, getting his bearings from the tactical map on his HUD.
“Roger,” Lieutenant Jones said. Of course, he already knew the position of the Vultures, but he needed to make sure the squad stayed focused. “Squads six and eight are down. Four and seven are headed back to the drop point. Eyes in the sky are picking up increasing activity below, closing on your position. The bastards know they’ve got fresh meat in the kitchen, and they don’t want to waste it.”
Caleb considered telling the lieutenant his metaphor sucked. The xenotrife didn’t kill people for food, or there would be a lot fewer bodies in the streets. No, they hunted humans because… well, he didn’t know why.
Not exactly.
Some people said there was no motive. That it just was. How else could you explain their arrival? An epic meteor storm had created one of the most amazing light shows ever. In the morning, a layer of fine powder covered a good portion of the planet’s surface. A few weeks later, people started dying. A few weeks after that, the demons began to appear.
Two years. That’s how long it had been since the trife arrived. Caleb could still remember his first deployment. He wasn’t doing search and rescue then. He was a Raider at the time. Marine special ops. His squad was one of the first on the scene when the trife began to appear, part of a control unit sent to New Orleans. The platoon hadn’t known what to expect, and they paid for it with their lives. Only four of them made it out, clinging to lifelines and dangling from choppers.
At least the bastards couldn’t fly.
Two years was a long time to survive in this mess, and he was never sure how he had made it this far. Luck? Determination? Stupidity? He had never accounted it to skill or talent. He had seen too many good men and women with so much more of both fall under the massive waves of the demons, claws tearing through the gaps in their body armor, ripping into flesh and bone and stealing their lives away in a blink.
They had survived the virus for that?
“Sir, we’re at half a klick,” Caleb said. “We can make it to the target.”
“But can you get back out?” Jones replied. “Make the call, Sergeant. I trust you and your team to do the right thing.”
Caleb’s head swept across his squad. They were experienced Marines, all of them. They had watched the world burn with him, and they were still here, aching for more. There was no fear in them. Fear had been scared out of them a long time ago, and in a dozen different ways. Banks had been a civilian back then, watching his daughter die from the virus. He had been there when the first trife broke through the windows of his home and murdered his wife and son. He spent every day regretting he had used his shotgun on the trife instead of on himself. Every day, he regretted surviving when his family hadn’t.
“We can make it, Sergeant,” Private Yen Sho said. “In and out. You know that’s how we like to do it.”
“Confirmed,” Corporal Banks said. “We don’t do half-missions. That’s bullshit. Let the rest of the platoon run back to mommy. We’re the Vultures.”
“Thirded,” Private Habib said. “And fourthed, speaking for Washington over there.”
Caleb glanced at Private Washington, who flipped Habib the finger. The private had lost his tongue and half his face to the trife. He couldn’t speak but he could still fight, and these days that was good enough for the United States Marine Corps.
“Unanimous,” Private Rodriguez said. “We wouldn’t be out here risking our asses on this one if Command didn’t think it was important.”
“Finish the job or die trying,” Banks said. “That isn’t our motto for nothing.”
Caleb smiled inside his helmet. He knew he could count on his crew.
“We’re continuing ahead, sir,” Caleb said. “Keep the engines warm for us.”
“Copy that, Sergeant,” Lieutenant Jones replied. “I’m redeploying the rest of the platoon in support. They’ll be waiting two klicks out from the RV, trying not to attract too much attention. When you call, they’ll come running.”
“Roger that, sir. What about air support?”
“Negative. Our choppers are frozen ahead of the retreat. Command isn’t willing to risk what little we have left on this one, not after the shit Valentine pulled.”
“I’m sure she had her reasons, sir.”
“Yeah, to force you into standing out there with a thousand trife swarming your position. You’ve got ten minutes at best, Sergeant. Get your team’s collective asses in gear.”
“Roger that. Vultures, let’s move, standard column, full ahead.”
Caleb broke into a run, one eye on the terrain ahead, the other on his HUD. Beyond the top-down map of the region, the Advanced Tactical Combat System connected him with every Marine within ten miles of his position through a hardened wireless mesh network, and more importantly, it linked him with his squad. Every member of the team had access to one another’s vitals, camera feeds, threat monitors and sensors, ammunition levels and more. The ATCS software took the six separate Marines and aggregated the data so they could organize and fight as one twelve-armed entity. As Habib liked to joke, they could play Pac-man on the damn things in the middle of a firefight and barely break a sweat.
The ATCS was embedded into their standard-issue Advanced Tactical Combat Armor, the latest and greatest in personal trife protection out of United States military R&D. Affectionately nicknamed SOS or Stormtrooper on Steroids by its wearers because of the vague resemblance, it was composed of a series of hard plates that covered most of the body. The black synthetic spider-steel weave bodysuit beneath it helped protect the joints. The bodysuit also contained a light assistive artificial musculature that increased strength and stamina of the wearer by as a much as thirty percent, allowing Caleb and the squad to run faster and longer than they would otherwise.
Right now, they needed every ounce of strength and speed they could get.
The squad charged through the city, alone but not alone, dancing over piles of rubble and ash, circling burned-out cars and trying not to trip over any of the human remains. The smell was horrible, the air thick and muggy and still filled with the smoke of the smoldering fires left behind by the morning’s four-bomber offensive. The bombers had dropped dozens of canisters of napalm across the area to clear the path of trife. It had been somewhat successful, giving the company a window of time to attempt the extraction of some high-value assets.
But the window was closing sooner than they had hoped. Both on the Vultures, and on the whole world.
Chapter 2
Caleb’s threat sensors picked up the first group of incoming trife seven seconds before they became visible. The AI of the ATCS tracked the minute changes in the feed from his helmet-mounted camera before combining that data with the feed from the drone over their heads and deciding to warn him about the incoming enemy.
Now, if the R&D folks could just make the system a little more sensitive to detect things like the trife that had burst out of the window a minute earlier. The system was good, but it wasn’t perfect.
“Banks, left flank,” Caleb said. “Sho, cover our rear. Washington, send ‘em to hell.”
Washington silently hefted his XM556 minigun, taking a moment to make sure the belt-feed was clear. The rest of the Vultures parted to give him a clear line of fire, rifles up and ready. They would need to conserve ammo, and the XM556 was enough to handle the early stages of the attack.
Caleb knew from experience that the trife would approach like sharks, sending in smaller groups to test them before they launched their full assault. It didn’t matter if they had overwhelming numbers, they always always attacked the same way. First, they would send a test group in like the one Caleb and his troops faced now. Then the next few groups would be their actual test of the firepower their enemy possessed. Then the gates of hell would open up, and the real demon horde would throw itself into the breach.
They had to be clear of the area by the time the horde showed up, or they were already as good as dead.
The trife came from the left side, a group a dozen strong. They spread out on the ground and at the side of the building closest to the Vultures. Caleb ignored them, keeping his attention on his HUD. The drone was marking more suspected trife on the map for him, showing an increasing hue of red drawing in from the northern side of the city.
The loud whine of the minigun was dulled by filters in his helmet, but Caleb still knew the moment Private Washington started shooting. Marks on the map began to disappear, wiped out by the dozens of rounds the weapon was spitting at the demons, literally tearing some of them in half.
The shooting stopped seconds later, leaving the street clear again. Pieces of trife were strewn across their left flank, none of the creatures getting close enough to force any of the other Vultures to start shooting.
“Nice work, Washington,” Caleb said. “Stay tight. Echelon left. We’re almost there.”
The Marines moved into position and continued forward, running through a line of thick smoke. The target came into view as they cleared the haze — a four-story stone building that had all the markings of a government installation. Old and tired before the war, with small windows and an ugly face that had some of the individual lettered tiles still attached.
U.S. DE AR ENT O HE TH AND HUM N ERVICES
“Lieutenant Jones, we have visual on the target, sir,” Caleb announced to his superior.
“Roger that, Sergeant. You’re behind schedule.”
Caleb couldn’t help but grin. Bastard. They were well ahead of the original schedule — the one where the nearest trife were at least four klicks out of the operational zone. That’s what the tactical geniuses in charge of the mission had estimated, but of course they would defend the outcome by falling back on statistical variance.
Screw statistical variance too. It was his unit whose lives were at risk. Not to mention the lives of the men and women they had entered the city to retrieve.
“Incoming,” Banks said, calling the warning, his ATCS picking up the next wave before Caleb’s. The trife were further back, closing from the left rear flank this time and trying to sneak up on them. The creatures didn’t understand that the Marines could still see them when they weren’t directly facing them. They had no concept of drones, cameras, sensors and AI. They saw humans and they attacked humans, and for every one the Vultures killed, there would be a hundred more to take its place.
That’s how humankind had lost the planet. And the planet was lost, no matter how much General Stacker wanted things to be different. He was the black sheep of Command, the only one who refused to quit fighting even when the fight was so obviously lost. The only one who was trying to keep the planet instead of escaping it with whatever they could salvage.
Caleb often wished he had been assigned to Stacker’s chain of command, but that wasn’t the way it had all worked out. He still considered himself a Marine even though his battalion had been transferred to Space Force six months ago to perform VIP extractions similar to this one.
If he survived this last mission, he, his squad, whatever was left of his battalion and some forty-thousand civilians would be leaving Earth behind. The Deliverance was loaded and almost ready to go, and Command wanted Doctor Valentine and her team on the ship before it lifted off. As one of the top remaining genetic experts in the country, they considered her a high-value asset.
The only reason she wasn’t already on the Deliverance was because she was a stubborn pain in the ass.
Lieutenant Jones had called her a lot worse than that, but Caleb didn’t know her well enough to be that disparaging. All he knew was that she insisted on staying behind as long as possible to continue her work, whatever that work was.
“Washington, Sho, take them out,” Caleb ordered. “Habib, Rodriguez, cover the entrance. Banks, you’re with me. We’re heading inside.”
“Roger, Sergeant,” the Vultures replied.
Caleb sprinted the last hundred meters to the front of the building. Opening Washington’s camera feed in his helmet, he saw the trife approaching the big Marine, coming from across the street to limit the effectiveness of Washington’s minigun.
He knew it wouldn’t phase Washington. Nothing did. Washington shifted casually, rotating to the group of trife on the left, three skirting the side of one of the buildings, all of them spaced nearly ten meters apart. They weren’t the demons closest to Washington, but he didn’t seem to care.
Caleb might have worried about most Marines. He didn’t worry about Washington. The private hefted the minigun and squeezed the trigger, the ammo belt sliding over his shoulder as the weapon discharged into the side of the structure, blowing through one of the trife, pausing momentarily and then hitting the second.
The closer trife grew larger in Washington’s feed, slightly blurry at the edges of the camera’s view. They were almost right on top of the big man now, ready to attack.
Caleb heard the separate reports in his helmet and watched on the feed as the trife went down one after another, taken by surprise by Sho, who had ducked behind one of the mangled cars. Washington didn’t even flinch as the last of them fell at his feet, claws reaching out toward him. He finished with his targets and swept around to the third group in the street, who were trying to use the scarred wreck of a bus for cover. Washington opened up again, his minigun rounds punching right through the sheet metal, and then through the enemy.
“Clear,” Sho said.
“Roger that,” Caleb replied. “Defensive positions at the entrance; we’re going in.” He rechecked his HUD. The larger group was drawing ever closer, and another pair of smaller groups had broken off to test them again. “Uglies approaching from the left flank, keep ‘em dying.”
“Roger.”
“Banks, you ready?” Caleb asked. The corporal was on the other side of the shattered glass entrance, pressed against the stone.
“Ready, Sarge.”
“Let’s go.”
They both rounded on the entrance and into a small foyer with the HHS placard hanging behind a simple desk that was slightly charred. Apparently, it had been on fire at some point within the last eight hours.
They moved into the building, sweeping the area with their carbines. There were no trife inside.
“Lieutenant,” Caleb said. “Do we have a location on Valentine and her team?”
“Confirmed,” Lieutenant Jones replied. “There’s a hardened lab four floors below ground level. Valentine and her people are holed up in it. There should be a secured staircase around the back near the loading dock.”
“Roger.” Caleb checked his HUD again. Their ten minutes were draining away in a hurry.
He squinted his left eye, navigating to the building schematic that had been uploaded into his ATCS. He located the loading dock and set a marker, the AI automatically drawing a path from his location to the target.
Caleb moved to his left, through an open door and into a long corridor. He jogged along it, Banks right behind him. He turned right when he neared the end and located the loading dock on his left, through a pair of double doors. The stairwell was ahead on his right.
He squinted his eye, navigating the ATCS, checking on Washington’s ammunition. He was carrying a backpack full of rounds for the minigun, but if he fired full bore he would go through the whole thing in less than twenty seconds. He had about half remaining and they hadn’t even hit real trouble yet. Caleb confirmed Washington and Sho were in position with Habib and Rodriguez, and then tested the door.
Locked. He found the biometric security panel to the left of the door.
“Lieutenant, please tell me Valentine gave you a bypass for the security lock?”
“Confirmed. Triple tap to enter the diagnostic menu, navigate to manual entry, and tell me when you’re there. I’ll read out the hash.”
“You have to be kidding me.” He checked the map. Time was running out. “She couldn’t have met us up here?”
“I gave you the option to leave her behind, Sergeant,” Jones replied. “Don’t ...”
Caleb didn’t catch the last part. A trife came flying through the doors to the loading dock, coming right at him.
He turned as quickly as he could, getting his forearm up in time for the creature’s claws to scrape across the thicker ballistic armor. He kept turning as it barreled into him, using the carbine as a club. Hitting it in the back of the head, he smashed it into the wall and pivoted again, putting the end of the weapon against it. Firing a single round into its skull, its head exploded while the rest of it slumped to the ground.
“Banks, cover me,” Caleb said, standing over the demon and tapping on the panel. The menu came up and he quickly moved to the manual entry. “Lieutenant, I’m ready.”
“4...F...G..6…” Jones started reciting the code, taking way too long between alphanumerics.
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