Hammerhead Resurrection Page 31

  As the Lakota rounded on him, Jeffrey felt himself return to the world of the living, the profound peace melting away in a fire of anticipation. Lifting his fist, still gripping the gun, he screamed out with fierce joy and anger.

  Two more Sthenos fighters came in from the north, and as they did, three more Lakota fighters streaked overhead, curving to engage.

  The Lakota threw contrails as they arced around the Sthenos. Their flight characteristics wouldn’t throw contrails in such warm air unless they were well above ten G’s. In that Jeffrey saw something that made his heart thump hard against his ribs. Despite all the pain of combat, despite all the horrible losses and grief he’d faced in his life, as the Lakota destroyed one Sthenos fighter and the next as if they were nothing more than soap bubbles drifting in a summer sky, Jeffrey’s heart overflowed.

  The Hammerheads had returned.

  The Lakotas turned, setting up a wide perimeter patrol pattern. From behind him, Jeffrey heard the ripping horror of a nuclear drive ship. Kicking his feet, he turned himself to see the special forces transport coming in low and slowing to a hover. In the cockpit, Marco held up his hand. Jeffrey would have returned the gesture had he not had his fingers in his ears due to the hurricane noise of the nuclear drive. The transport turned. Stacy stood on the open ramp, a safety line around her waist. Marco expertly dipped the end of the ramp into the water, and the man they called X threw Jeffrey a life ring. He’d hooked it with his foot, and they pulled him up onto the ramp. The ramp lifted and sealed, shutting out the screaming engines.

  As the ship arced upward, turning toward the Amazon, Stacy gave Jeffrey a water bottle.

  He drank deeply, and wiping his mouth with the back of his salt-crusted sleeve, said, “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me,” Stacy said. “Thank Whitetip. She’d have killed someone if we hadn’t let her come get you.”

  He unzipped his flight suit and began pulling his arms out of the sleeves. “We have to move up our timeline. They’ll start looking for us after this. Is Leif still modifying pilots?”

  “Yes, but there’s something else.”

  Jeffrey didn’t like Stacy’s tone nor the gravity of her expression.

  “What’s happened?”

  “We had a… conflict with Captain Donovan.”

  Jeffrey rolled his eyes. “What else is new?”

  “This was worse…”

  “What is it?”

  “He shot Samantha.”

  Jeffrey felt his legs and arms go weak as he could find nothing to say.

  Stacy told him about the meeting. “We have Donovan in custody.”

  “She’s… not dead?”

  “Not when we left.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “I have no idea. When we left, Dr. Monti was prepping her for surgery.”

  “I’m so sorry Jeffrey,” Stacy said. “If I hadn’t gotten so close to him, or if I’d controlled the gun more effectively.”

  “I don’t want to hear that,” Jeffrey said. He wanted to say more, but the desire to comfort Stacy couldn’t form itself through the wall of grief he felt, and he fell into silence.

  …

  After landing, Jeffrey ran as best he could on stiff legs to the medical tent. He found Leif sitting in front of it, his head in his hands.

  “How is she?”

  Leif looked up, dark circles under his eyes. In a matter of fact tone, as though he’d never expected anything otherwise, said, “You’re alive.” He glanced at the tent flap. “It’s not all good news though.”

  “Is she?”

  “I’m sorry dad.”

  Jeffrey entered the tent. Inside Dr. Monti was leaning over a figure on a cot, its feet splayed sideways. Caterina moved aside, exposing Samantha’s pale face, mouth slack and eyes partially open. Her neck was wrapped in a bandage that seemed tight, as though it might choke her.

  “Admiral,” Dr. Monti said lifting her chin and inhaling deeply as though steeling herself.

  He approached and touched Samantha’s wrist. It felt unlike hers, too delicate. He gripped the relaxed hand.

  “I’m so sorry,” Dr. Monti said. “I did everything I could.” She had a deadness in her eyes, which Jeffrey understood too well.

  He remained silent for a moment, holding down the emotion welling in his throat before he could manage to say, “I know you did Caterina.” He let go of Samantha’s hand. “I won’t have you second guessing yourself on this. Is that clear?”

  Caterina tried to smile, but like a cloud of breath on a cold day, it failed to hold its form. “If it were only that easy.”

  Jeffrey nodded, remembering her fight to save Nathan Books, how personally she’d taken his death. She would have fought for Samantha like that. He wished there was something more he could say to help her but knew nothing would. Instead he said, “I need to see Donovan,” and with a gentle touch on her shoulder left the tent.

  Outside he said to Leif, “I need to go to my tent. Then I need you to take me to Donovan.”

  Leif followed him to his tent. Inside Jeffrey found his 1911, checked its magazine for rounds, released the slide to chamber one, and pocketed it. Coming out of the tent, he nodded to Leif, who took him back to the main camp, to a tent on the north side with Samantha’s guards standing at the entrance. As they approached, both marines saluted. While their demeanor was strict, Jeffrey could see failure in their eyes. As with Caterina, he felt the need to say something supportive, but without the words, he returned their salute and entered the tent in silence.

  Inside, he found two more guards standing on either side of a diminished Donovan, who sat on a container with his hands restrained behind his back, head down. Handcuffs had also been locked around his ankles.

  When Donovan’s head rose, his expression darkened.

  Jeffrey pulled a crate from the side and sat in front of Donovan, close. When he drew the 1911 from his cargo pocket, the guards shifted their weight uneasily. Ignoring them, his eyes falling to the dark, scratched metal of the gun, he said, “It’s treason you know.”

  Donovan’s words came quick, “It was an accident.”

  Jeffrey looked up, trapping Donovan’s red-rimmed gaze with his. “Was drawing your weapon on a Navy officer an accident?”

  Donovan leaned away slightly. “What are you going to do with me?”

  Jeffrey felt rage tickling in the back of his mind, back where his true reaction to Samantha’s death lay waiting for him when he was ready to face it. “You intentionally undermined my plans, refused a direct order from our commander in chief, attempted to take a subordinate as a hostage, and killed the president of the United States.”

  Donovan’s voice cracked as he said, “I never… I didn’t—”

  Jeffrey cut him off, anger growling in his throat. “This is a time of war captain. You are a traitor.” He lifted the gun, finger on the trigger, and placed it between Donovan’s eyes.

  Donovan swallowed hard.

  “I’d be well within my rights you know.”

  “Please,” Donovan said, his lips trembling, “if I could go back…” A tear welled and, growing fat and glittering, slipped down his cheek, leaving a wet trail.

  Jeffrey felt somehow the tear wasn’t for Donovan’s fear for himself, but for what he’d done. Still, he kept the gun barrel on Donovan’s forehead as he said, “I need you to appreciate how close you are right now. Do you understand?”

  Keeping still, Donovan said in a whisper, “Yes, sir.”

  Jeffrey lowered the gun to his lap. “Being a fool and an asshole is, in my opinion, not reasonable cause for execution.”

  Donovan exhausted his held breath, and as his head fell forward, he sobbed, blubbering “so sorry,” and “thank you,” now and again.

  When he’d settled himself, Jeffrey said, “You’ll be taken 1,000 miles away. We’ll supply you with weapons for hunting, a filtration bottle, and a tent.”

  Donovan’s red eyes rose now, fear again in them, “Alone?”r />
  “You are, as of this moment, dishonorably discharged. You will stay clear of U.S. installations. If I see you again, I will consider you an aggressor and kill you. Understood?”

  Donovan nodded.

  Jeffrey stared at him for a moment, feeling as though standing was the signature on the pardon, and he felt unable to write it. His finger remained on the trigger of the pistol. He searched the man’s dark eyes and willed himself to see the life they’d lived, the boyhood, the hopeful ensign, the years of faithful command to Cantwell. Only then was he able to stand, pocket the pistol and leave the tent.

  Making his way to the edge of the encampment, Jeffrey walked down a solitary trail, coming to a rocky outcrop. He looked out beyond the canopy of trees. The valley lay in a broad curve in the bright sunlight. Branches swayed in the breeze. His thoughts swirled around Donovan.

  Damn him to hell.

  As he willed himself to let go, his mind betrayed him further, shifting to Samantha’s cool hair draped across his neck that night by the river… then her lifeless eyes. He stopped himself short and willed his thoughts to the future. He imagined stepping down off the Lakota’s ladder in Times Square into a profound silence. Fifty years ago, he’d been part of the team to offer coverage to escapees after the Demos attack. The Hammerheads had taken up the Mars Dome as a base of operations. There had been fewer than five hundred personnel in that city-sized dome. The shops and street fronts had been left as they were, some doors standing open, important belongings left out—pens, watches… all left untouched. Week after week, as those things remained in place, time seemed frozen. Small things were supposed to move, disappear, be used, stolen, wear out. The silence had been the most striking. When standing still, he could hear nothing aside from his own breath and blood coursing in his ears. The quiet seemed to collapse in on him. He imagined Times Square like that—shops left empty, a baby carriage sitting half off a curb, the canyons of steel and glass deathly empty.

  What good was fighting if life was already destroyed? Would they find only silence? The hearts of major cities without the people… no arguments, no laughter, no footfalls, no traffic… would be nothing more than concrete hulls left to collapse as millennia passed.

  He turned and watched the men and women coming and going in the forest. How many enclaves of human life remained? There must be thousands of small, isolated groups around the world. He understood why Donovan had wanted to bring them together, but it wouldn’t work. Taking on the Sthenos head on was like trying to fist fight a grizzly bear. No matter how tough a fighter was, no matter how long he trained, even an old, small grizzly could tear him apart. Their only hope was to sneak up on the bear and kill it before it knew they were there.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  All Courtney Reynolds could think to do was shoot baskets in the side driveway. Her family hadn’t had power in two weeks, and their pantry was thinning out. In the fields beyond the yard, the cornstalks, with no irrigation pumps to water them, had gone burned-brown in the intense sun. A few days ago, people had passed through scavenging the small cobs. She asked her father if they should offer some of their food. Without a word, he’d gone back into the house.

  She lined up her shot and extended her arm. As the basketball rolled from her fingertips, she felt it was right. It arced toward the basket and cracked through the net with a satisfying chunk. She heard another chunk, similar but distant, which repeated and repeated. As it grew, a low vibration rose up, almost more a feeling in her chest than a sound in her ears. The chunking grew and became metallic. It came from the street. She ran to the front of the house. What she saw caused her to lose her step, and she fell to her hands and knees.

  A huge transport, black as night, hovered down the road a foot off the ground. The air below it warped as if with swirling heat waves. Beside it walked a monster on four legs, which bent in opposing directions as it moved. Holding it’s exoskeletal torso and a third pair of limbs upright like a centaur, it gripped a silvered rod in its three-fingered hand. The helmeted face, covered by an expressionless visor and jaw-piece, turned to her. She felt disconnected from herself, unable to so much as breathe, let alone run or scream.

  It held up the rod, which caught a flash of sunlight. A flare of electric-blue leapt from it, washing over her vision. She dropped into darkness.

  …

  When Courtney woke, she tried to touch her hurting head, but her hands had been bound behind her back. She shifted her legs and ankle shackles clinked. The metal felt ice cold and foreign. She sat in her own yard still. Across the front lawn, near the steps to the house, four of the beasts sat on folded legs in a circle, their lower bodies prone in the grass. The lower face plates of their helmets hung open, exposing insect-like mandibles, which worked over something soft and red. Their hands reached to the center of their circle where a thing made of bright white lengths and wet redness lay. A body. They pulled away strips of muscle, eating. An arm extended from the near skeleton, her father’s watch on the wrist.

  Her mother came running from behind the house, their shotgun raised, screaming, “Get away from him.”

  She fired at one of the things as it put its arm up. As the shotgun concussed and a flick of fire and smoke blew from its barrel, the monster’s arm vanished, spattered against its body. It turned away, the ruined stump of its arm pumping red gushes. The lens of its helmet had been blown away on one side. Beneath, she saw a corpse-white eye, laced with red capillaries, lolling. The monster screamed, and she thought her ears would break against the two-tone high and low sound, a mixture of shrill pain and thundering rage.

  Her mother pumped the shotgun. A shell came cartwheeling free from the ejector port as one of the monsters whipped a glittering metal rod at her. A bolt of lightning clawed its way across the yard and ran up her mother’s leg to her chest. She dropped as if she were a bag of skin filled with gelatin. As she hit the ground, the shotgun fired into the air. The echo of the blast settled away across the fields.

  The monsters moved to her mother’s body, making low thundering sounds at each other.

  “Leave her alone,” Courtney screamed at them, but they gave her no heed.

  They tore her mother’s clothes off, exposing pale skin, which they pulled away as if a second set of clothing. They stripped the muscles from the bone. One took its helmet off, exposing a smooth skull and white eyes, marshmallow puffy, with no pupils, looking like diseased flesh.

  Stuffing the meat into their wide-opening mandibles, they ate until all the major muscles were gone. Rising, they put their helmets back on, leaving the two skeletons with bones still attached by ligaments and tendons, arms and legs askew, rib cages and hips like baskets filled with organs. Her mother and father’s faces had remained untouched. Both had slack expressions, mouths agape. Only after it had ended, her parents skin laying strewn aside like bull hides, did Courtney consider that she should have looked away.

  She began trembling as a guttural growl rose in her throat as if by its own will. When it reached her mouth, she screamed. She screamed until her throat hurt and when one of the beasts came to her and thundered at her, she screamed at it with fear and grief and rage. She spit her scream at the obsidian black visor as if she could break it with her voice. Even as it thundered again, raising its rod high, she screamed.

  Only the brilliance of the electric-blue light silenced her.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Afternoon sunlight glowed through the roof of Jeffrey’s tent as he lay on his cot lost in thought. Since Samantha’s death, Leif and Caterina had worked long hours modifying the remaining pilots. A second pilot, a young woman from Mikelson’s group, had died, and another young man had been left unable to speak. Jeffrey had, as best he could, and as he’d done so many times before, brought up an emotional numbness to shield himself from it. Still, regrets plagued him. If he’d dealt with Donovan when they first crashed, or if he hadn’t allowed himself to be taken down by the Sthenos fighter… she’d still be alive.

/>   Stacy called from outside his tent flap, “Jeffrey?”

  “Come in,” he said, sitting up onto the edge of his cot.

  The flap drew aside and Stacy entered. More than a decade older than the twenty-something she’d been when they first met, she still looked young and beautiful despite the scar on her face, which he’d created with his rough stitches. She wore her hair slightly longer than the pixie cut she’d had then, but still, she had a playfully dangerous look, which reminded Jeffrey of Puck from A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. That thought lifted him slightly from his self-imposed darkness.

  She sat on a container and leaned forward, elbows on knees. When she looked at him, he saw a profound sadness in her eyes.

  In a concerned tone, he asked, “What’s going on?”

  Giving a slight shake of her head, she said, “Nothing. Leif asked me to come get you… said he’s done with the last pilot.”

  He took hold of her hands. “Stacy, I know you well enough to see when something’s bothering you. Talk to me.”

  She looked to the side, appeared to be considering speaking or not, and said, “I can’t stop thinking about President Delaney… that it was my fault. If I hadn’t gotten in Donovan’s face…”

  “Stacy,” he fell silent trying to choose his words perfectly, which he knew to be impossible in such a moment. “I’ve been having the same problem.”