The Forgotten Kings (The Scourge Book 4) Page 7
He has to die…
She had heard Joel briefly talk about killing Jasper’s father, but unfortunately, she heard no plan of how to bring that about. She moved her head to the side and looked at Jasper.
Use his son to get to him…
She turned away in disgust at her own thoughts and immediately wondered if she would have had the same inclination if she were still one hundred percent human. It was a question she had no answer for.
She looked at the middle-aged woman sleeping opposite her. Mary had been a stalwart by her side, becoming the grandmother Jess and Jasper deserved. She was family. Ten or so yards away, Evan was having a discussion with his grandfather, but the other background noise blocked her attempts to listen in.
She rested her hand on the top of the plastic covered table. It was vibrating. She looked at Jess tapping the table and wondered if that was the source, but the trembling was constant, despite it being hardly noticeable.
She stretched out her fingers, laying her palm flat.
The slight juddering was still there.
She stood, peering over the side of the table at Flint. He was laid stretched out, not touching anything.
Earthquake? Does Iowa get earthquakes?
Shouts came from outside. Many in the diner looked out into the dark, not seeing anything, but Marina could see movement and then Joel.
The door to the diner swung open and he ran inside, extinguishing the nearest candle.
“Put the candles out, there are helicopters coming this way!” he shouted, rushing to the next.
As those inside put out the lights, Marina looked through the glass into the gray-black of the night sky for any specks of light.
The vibrations were now joined by sound, a distant deep thundering.
She reached out until her hand touched her daughter’s, which she grabbed. Jess was doing the same with Jasper.
In the absolute darkness, some inside the diner were crouching, while others tried to see where the repeating noise was coming from.
Joel crept along the checkered floor until he was level with Marina’s table. They could see each other clearly.
“Coming from the northwest,” he said.
“There!” shouted a man.
A light, brighter than the most brilliant star was growing in size.
They all sat in silence, but Joel and Marina could hear the hearts around them, almost as loud as the chopper passing overhead.
Glasses and bottles rattled on the tables, and then the sound started to decrease in volume.
The door to the diner opened once again, and Carla moved along the aisle almost bumping into Joel. “It was a troop carrier,” she said.
Joel got to his feet. “Did you see which direction it was heading?”
“Yeah, towards the camp…”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Joel sat inside his pickup, in the driver's seat. Outside, tired humans staggered back from the diner to their respective places in the vehicles, with only one flashlight to guide them in the darkness.
Joel looked again at the green glow of his radio’s LCD screen. The time was 4 a.m.
Still three hours to sun up, and then any convoy the size of theirs would be easily spotted from the sky.
The camp, if it was still there was still six hours away. They needed to be back on the road.
Carla and Anna were having a discussion near the diner entrance. Something was wrong.
He pushed his door open and jogged over to them. “What’s going on?”
“One of the humans is missing,” said Anna. “We left Westlands with forty, now we got thirty-nine.”
Joel swung around looking first out into the black void around them, and then at the vehicles, some of which now had engines idling.
“I can’t believe any of the hybrids would have been that dumb…”
“Are you sure?” said Carla. “I saw plenty looking at us like we were a Thanksgiving turkey.”
“There’s a difference between looking and… killing.” He looked across the road to the blocklike forms just visible. “Maybe someone wandered off. Over there maybe. Do we know who it was?”
Anna shook her head. “I… didn’t take names, just numbers… I think maybe one of the older people…” There was no need to see her face, the guilt was obvious in her voice.
“I’ll check—” said Carla.
“No, I’ll go,” interrupted Joel. “Give me ten. Keep the engines turned off while I’m gone though, no point wasting fuel, but be ready to leave as soon as I get back.”
Before Carla or Anna could protest, he sprinted off into the shadows, moving as fast as his sight would allow him to avoid objects in the complete blackness. He sped across the country lane and under a large wooden sign which stretched across the entrance to the trailer park.
A track ran in multiple directions, one of which ended at a wooden cabin. He ran to that first, stepping up onto the deck, and switched on his flashlight, pointing it through a hole where a window should have been. Inside were bodies stripped of flesh. Yellowing bones laid at wrong angles, glinting in his light’s beam, but they were old and were already crumbling.
“Is there anyone in here!” he shouted into the entrance lobby.
Silence replied.
He turned and looked at the boxlike shapes parked around the area. It was going to take a while to search them all.
Maybe someone is hiding? he thought as he stepped back onto the path and ran to the nearest motorhome. A creeping thought was shouting at the back of his mind. One which he was finding it harder to ignore as he finished searching inside the first vehicle and ran to the next.
Still, though, he pushed a rational explanation back into the front of his mind and pictured an elderly person walking slowly down the country road. Not a pleasant thought, but one he would have preferred to the…
A faint, but unmistakable metallic odor drifted past him. He was now onto the fifth out of maybe twelve motorhomes, and the smell of blood was definitely coming from the sixth. His heart sunk. By now he knew the smell of death but still clung onto the idea that maybe whoever it was inside the vehicle in front of him had just died of natural causes.
He pulled the latch across and opened the door, pulling it back slowly. The smell hit him in the face, making him waver slightly as he walked up the step and inside. He swung his flashlight around a scene of frenzied bloodletting. Streaks of red graffiti covered everything. The cupboard doors, the orange fabric seats, the walls, the ceiling… He walked through the narrow aisle being careful not to touch any of the red substance and pushed the final door open. On the bed was another body, but this one was a fresh kill. The blankets were dyed crimson, and lifeless eyes looked back at him from an elderly woman.
Despite the smell of the blood invading his senses, the scene made him queasy. This wasn’t just a kill for hunger. This person enjoyed the suffering which came first.
He staggered out of the confined space, slamming the door behind, thankful for the cool night air.
He looked across at the vehicles all waiting for him to return and wondered which one contained the hybrid psychopath.
He quickly made his way back. On entering the lot, he saw a middle-aged man wearing disheveled clothes arguing with Marina and Anna. As Joel neared them he feared what they were discussing.
“We have to find my wife!” shouted the man. His head flicked between the three of them.
The two women looked at Joel for answers.
“I couldn’t find her… and we need to leave.”
Horror added to the look of panic on the man's unshaven face. “What you mean ‘we need to leave?’ My wife, Allie is out there! We can’t just leave her!”
Anna looked desperately to Joel. “She has dementia…”
Choices ran through Joel’s mind, each one sending him deeper into a pit of numbness. He looked at Marina and Anna. “She’s gone. We’re leaving.” They both hesitated.
“Maybe we should send out a search party? She can’t—” Anna stopped on seeing Joel’s expression. She looked away from the man and walked to the pickup. Marina did the same, shaking her head as she left.
The man looked out into the darkness, then back to Joel, desperation in his red eyes. “Please? I’m not like you, I can’t move quickly and see in the darkness, can’t you go look again?”
Emotion threatened to break through Joel’s resolute exterior. He looked at the man directly. “Stay or leave with us now. What’s it going to be?”
The man looked at the vehicles whose engines were firing up, then took a step backward towards the diner.
Joel turned away. “Alright then.”
*****
The city of Cedar Rapids with its concrete towers came and went in the darkness. Joel felt the thousands of vamps roaming the streets, and how the convoy drew their attention, but the vehicles were gone before the night creatures could react. Next, they were amongst hills, forests, and the Iowa River which crept close to the highway then moved away. The silvery waters looked cold and bleak, reflecting what little moonlight was able to creep through the thick clouds.
Anna had spoken only a few words to the man next to her, confirming the route they were on. When Joel reappeared from visiting the trailer park he was different. He had witnessed something which imprisoned his thoughts. She presumed it had something to do with the man’s wife but couldn’t understand why Joel hadn’t mentioned anything if he had seen a body amongst the motorhomes. Either way, the figure of the man watching the convoy drive away still haunted her.
Joel watched the vehicle in front, slowing and accelerating when needed. Flickers of the scene from inside the motorhome kept blending with the red hue from the rear lights, and he kept blinking to wash them away. As an FBI operator he had had the misfortune to enter crime scenes similar, but for some reason, despite the horror the Scourge brought, he thought that type of killing was a thing of the past. There was something distinctly human about it. The vamps usually did not kill out of spite or some inner turmoil, they killed because of the hunger which drove them to feed. The slaughter of the man’s wife was born from insanity. He wasn’t even starting to doubt it was a hybrid or any other Alkron. The human faces of those in the convoy scrolled through his mind, each one being crossed off or left on an imaginary psycho list.
“Joel? Over,” said Carla.
Her voice jolted him out of his thoughts. “I’m here. Over.”
“It will start getting lighter soon. We might want to think about getting off the highway. Over.”
“Agreed. We should take the next exit, but we still need to avoid any major cities. Over.”
Carla agreed.
As the sun breached the horizon, they headed west then south again, passing over the Mississippi and a few smaller rivers then entering Illinois. Yellow and beige fields of unharvested crops bordered them on both sides.
“I guess we don’t need the food anymore… just blood,” said Kizzy, looking at the fields passing by.
In her mind, Amos saw what she was imagining, which was fields of people, standing like mannequins with tubes removing their blood into ditches.
“No food, no humans, no blood,” grumbled Dalton.
“I… like… food,” said David, sitting next to Kizzy. His voice trembling.
She smacked him on the leg, making him wince. “Oh, we’ll make sure there’s food for all you humans! I’m not going to give up on hamburgers!” Her eyes then trailed off, and she sighed. “And fries… with a good shake… although that might need to have blood in it.”
Amos smiled on hearing the man in the backseat swallow uncomfortably.
Outside the sky was gray and monotone as if the day regretted coming into being.
Farmers’ fields and small homes perched in the middle of them flowed by as the hours did the same, until the sun was at its autumn zenith hidden behind a blanket of cloud.
Carla informed the convoy to slow down and stop, and the twelve vehicles sat on a fractured road alongside some silver grain silos and a rectangular packing plant.
“The camp should be a few miles north of here. Over,” said Carla. “I suggest we leave the vehicles here and my squad does some recon. Over.”
Joel got out of the pickup, Anna did the same.
“You should stay here. Might be a good idea to have a quick check on the humans’ condition…” he said to her. She nodded and walked to the truck behind.
As Joel approached Carla’s vehicle at the head of the convoy, she and her soldiers were already checking their weapons. “I’m coming with you,” he said.
“Honestly, I’d prefer if you stayed here if anything goes wrong.”
“I think you can handle yourselves.”
She smiled. “I meant if anything goes wrong here.”
He sighed, then nodded. “You should take a hybrid with you…”
A noise made them both look back. Evan and Gigi were walking towards them, the latter with her rifle.
“Hey, what’s with the hybrid love and the wolf hate?” said Gigi.
Joel noticed Evan looked less than his usual expressive self. “Everything okay?”
“I’m fine. Just need to get some air.” Evan looked at Carla. “You got another weapon I can use?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Carla and the others jogged past mist-covered fields full of damp and rotting reeds of corn. Tens of acres spilled out in all directions, only broken up by patches of overgrown grass, single-lane roads, and the occasional white farmhouse. The sky above hadn’t changed from its uniform gray all day. The sun, despite mostly being overhead, was providing scant light making it feel a lot later than it was.
As they approached the road which headed north towards where the camp should have been, they stepped over a fence and into a field of weeds and mud. They made sure to keep trees, and then a group of rusting farm buildings between them and any possible view from the north.
Cutting across a large field they ran into the cover of a thin strip of forest, on the other side more fields ran up a slight incline to a bank which blocked any view of the small town on the other side.
Carla crouched at the tree line, the others did the same.
“Not much cover out there if they have spotters on that hilltop,” said Keller to Carla.
Bishop scanned the ridge with binoculars. “I’m not seeing any movement.”
“I’ll go,” said Evan. “I can cover the distance to the hilltop in maybe eight seconds. If I’m spotted, they will just think it’s a stray vamp and I’ll lead them away.”
Carla looked at the young man. She had watched him tear through the vamps a few nights earlier. The kid was a fighter.
She nodded and Evan’s eyes turned black, and he burst out of the undergrowth, across the faded grass and mud, ripping through the dirt.
Bishop tracked him with the eyepieces. “Okay, he’s approaching the top… he’s there. He’s looking into the dip on the other side… he’s waving us forward.”
“Let’s go,” said Carla.
The group quickly got to their feet and jogged forward roughly following the route Evan had just taken.
When they got to the top, they crouched once again. In front of them were more trees, but they were high enough to see over them and to the roads and buildings of the town a few miles further north. A small fence, seven feet high, was just visible through the forest which cut across the main road which led into town.
“I’m not seeing anyone on the streets,” said Bishop, looking again with her binoculars. “Not seeing any vamps too, so I guess that’s…”
“What is it?” said Carla.
“A black Humvee moving down the main street—” Bishop watched as the vehicle stopped outside a brick built store. Some black uniformed soldiers jumped out, as well as an older female soldier who appeared to be directing proceedings. The soldiers ran into the store.
“What’s happening?” said Carla, wishing she either had her own pair of binoculars or the hybrids’ vision.
“There’s military down there… but… not ours, I think they’re corporation—”
“Damn it,” said Carla. Ripples of concern moved through those around her. “We’re too late.”
Bishop watched as a man and woman were dragged from the store and thrown to the ground. On their knees, they both appeared to plead with the older woman who looked at them dispassionately, then stepped away nodding to the nearest soldier who put bullets in both of their heads. Bishop pulled the binoculars from her eyes.
“So what do we do?” said Keller. “We taking this place back from the corporation? Or what?”
Carla took the binoculars from Bishop and looked for herself. She caught the Humvee driving away, losing it amongst the town's buildings, but then picking it up again as it drove onto what looked like a sports field. She sighed. The area contained columns of soldiers, all clad in black uniforms, and two troop-carrying helicopters. There were also more Humvees, some with turrets.
She handed the eyepieces back to Bishop, crouching once again, and moving back the way they had just come. “We’re leaving.”
Keller, Bishop, and some of the others hesitated to move.
“Is there nothing we can do for these people?” said Evan.
“The town already belongs to the corporation. If we leave now, we might make it to the next camp before nightfall and let them know what’s coming for them.” Carla broke into a jog down the slope, then held her radio to her mouth.
Gigi and Evan exchanged a look, then with the others got to their feet.
*****
Copeland rushed through the dimly lit corridors excited, or as close to that emotion that he came to these days, by a secret encrypted message he had received from Adrian. One of the three tablets had been recovered and was waiting for him at an undisclosed location within the ruins of San Jose. It was Copeland’s idea of the meeting spot. He wanted it to be away from the series of buildings which made up the corporation’s campus, out of the view of any unwanted prying eyes.