I staggered to my feet, my body aching from the impact. I heard Sumo go on full attack mode just before the beast was on me again, its jaws open wide. I punched the fucking thing in the face, but it was like hitting a wall. The goddamn thing roared in anger, then swiped at me with something sharp. In the darkness, I couldn’t tell if it had a weapon or simply claws, but it fucking hurt.

  I released my Heidelberg blade; my hand gripped it tightly as I stabbed and sliced. I felt it dig into the thick hide. I knew it had found muscle and bone. The thing moved back just out of reach, and I swear to God, it laughed. A very creepy, high-pitched almost human laugh. The sound sent chills up my spine and yes, I pissed myself. Just a bit.

  We barely managed to dodge the next attack, but already I knew I was in trouble. I was hurt. Sumo kept darting in and taking bites, but the HappyBear or Bigfoot or whatever ignored the vicious attacks. He was solely focused on ending me. We were running out of options; I needed to get away, and fast.

  I started to run, my augmented legs pounding the ground. I could hear the beast's roar growing closer, and I knew that it was gaining on me. We sprinted through the forest, dodging trees and jumping over fallen logs. I turned twice to fire at the thing, but both times it seemed to vanish from sight only to appear just off my sightline seconds later. I considered launching grenades but figured the same thing would happen.

  I am not ashamed to say I was running for my life; I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. The fight or the fear was causing me to overheat badly, and I knew I couldn’t go on for much longer. Sumo seemed to sense that I was faltering and stopped to take on the thing alone. He would give me time to get away.

  “No, Sumo.” I gave him the command to retreat. Not something either of us liked, but strategically it was the right move. I was running flat-out, faster than I’ve ever run before but could still hear the HappyBear’s roar getting louder and occasionally more of the weird laughter. I was running out of time, and I knew we needed to find a way to escape.

  Finally, I burst into a clearing and saw my chance. Ahead of me, I could see our perimeter line. I shouldn’t have led the beast back toward our line, but I would not defeat this thing alone. Shit, who am I kidding, I would not defeat it at all. Sometimes, you just have to realize the game is rigged, and it’s time to fold.

  Halo and Priest were waiting by the armory. “We gotta move, boys,” I said, running by at nearly full speed. The rest of my team quickly fell in behind.

  “Um, Boss, why are we running?” Halo asked, struggling to keep up with my frenetic pace.

  Priest quipped, “Second Battle Law of Kovach.”

  Halo shook his head. When he’d joined Banshee, the second in command had given him a weathered printout of twenty-five rules. The unofficial mantra of the squad. The second of these had read, ‘If you see Prowler running during a battle, you might want to try to keep up.’ He kept up.

  Hours later, Red-7’s recon patrol reported back. “No sign of anything like you reported, Master Sergeant.”

  “It wasn’t there?”

  “Ada, you have the footage, the sensor data. Shit, I have the scars, and look at Sumo, he looks like hell.”

  “It was there, Joe. HappyBears are real.”

  Shit, maybe it was a Squatch.

  I moved cautiously into the tumbledown structure. The interiors weren’t in much better shape than the outside. Assorted furniture, desks, and broken chairs formed a rickety barrier near the far wall. Carpet, or perhaps just a rug, lay in shreds on a concrete floor. The cement stained with what might have been blood, or vomit, or who the hell knows.

  Overhead, a long light tube flickered to life. The thing looked ancient, maybe even a fluorescent gas light. The illuminations cast everything into ghastly shades of sickly yellow. How did this place still have power?

  Sumo ranged farther ahead; Halo was helping Hauk deploy what remained of his squad. The thought of a defensive perimeter seemed ridiculous after the day we’d had, but it was still the right play. That new fucking beast was still out there, even if no one else had seen it.

  “Priest, find your way to God’s country and keep us safe tonight.” I would have preferred to have Darkman on sniper duty, but he’d bought the farm down in Costa Rica when some other mutant beast had trampled him in his sniper’s hide. The thought that all these missions we’d been on for years, knocking out bio-labs and terrorist cells around the world, was exactly the same tech we were now fighting. More than once I’d personally had to hand over captured intel and data to Hammer personnel. Data they had obviously used to help build this army of mutant freaks.

  Moving deeper into the building, I became aware of a smell. A mixture of swamp, salt air, and decay. It immediately transported me back to a canoe trip with my dad when I was fourteen. That would have been after Texas but before he shipped off to fight in the third Gulf War.

  I moved around a clump of vines and moss that may have once been a computer workstation. I still had no clue as to what this place might have been, but the decay suggested decades of neglect, not just months. My mind subdivided, and part of it was back in that canoe in central Florida, the black water gliding past with only the occasional splash of a large swamp predator or some invisible bird taking flight to break the spell.

  It had been hot and so humid, late July or maybe August. We’d made camp on the river the past two nights. I was tired and had scratched all day from the countless mosquito bites, but I refused to complain. Time with Pops was fleeting and often artificial, as if he was playing a role more than simply being himself. This day he was mostly silent, and what filled that silence was magical.

  We rounded a sweeping bend in the river, and suddenly, the black water morphed into a dazzling crystal clear stream of such clarity I couldn’t be sure we weren’t floating on air. I could see the shadow of myself and the canoe a dozen feet below. My darker reflection seemed to stare back just as confused at what he was seeing as I was looking down.

  Sumo’s growl brought me to a sudden stop and my gun to my shoulder. I approached the darkened passage where the dog stood in his low guard position signifying an unknown threat. That could be good or bad. Sumo certainly knew what the Furies were now. He had a unique signal for them.

  I moved past and switched on the Shitek night optics, which flooded the space with IR and NV illumination, which resolved itself in my HUD to a huddling mass of something in a far corner. The cascading mop of unkempt blonde hair suggested humans, but I took no chances. I signaled Sumo to close in.

  The huddled figure made no move to flee or defend herself. Moving closer, I could definitely see she was female. The suit’s sensors detected respiration, cardiac activity, and a variety of other signals that the girl was alive.

  “She may be in shock, Joe,” Ada offered.

  I shook my head; we weren’t in the rescue business, even though that seemed to be all we were doing this week. The smart thing for me was to make sure she was unarmed and continue clearing the structure. Sumo, though, had broken position and was nosing over to the girl… woman, person. He was not detecting a threat, and my partner’s threat detector was even better than my own.

  Sliding my helmet back into its receiver, I broke the silence, “Miss, are you okay?” You know, except for the end of the world, monsters trying to kill you, sleeping in one of the shittiest places on Earth. Yeah, I left all those details out. Her head continued to hang down, she continued to ignore me.

  I spent several minutes attempting to assess the woman. I lifted her head, blank vacant eyes stared back at me. She had a massive gash across her chest, continuing up a once beautiful cheek, and disappearing into her hairline. Dried blood lined the wound, and small bluish globules hung to parts like an infectious fruit.

  “Medic!” We could at least treat her, I thought, softening the guilt I knew I’d feel later. This woman was gone, her body just hadn’t figured it out yet.

  Hauk’s men reported back that they, too, had found a survivor. An old man resting near the back corner of a warehouse space. I filled him in on our find, and we agreed to set up treatment areas inside the warehouse.

  The old man was in better shape than the young woman but not much more helpful. He’d been on the move for days since the Furies moved in. He and his wife had lived in a high-end retirement community a dozen miles to the south. After the attack, they had been okay for a couple of weeks, but then they had to venture farther and farther out to find food.

  “One day she just didn’t come back,” the man whose name we’d learned was Osan said.

  He talked in detail about his adventures after that. His failed attempts to track her down. His first encounters with the lethal vines, and then just yesterday, he’d spotted and narrowly avoided a Furie.

  “Damn thing scared the hell out of me. God did not make anything like that. Those creatures are not of this world.”

  I mostly agreed with him on that. “Did you know the girl, the one you probably passed inside?” The medical team had her on a gurney and brought her into the dimly lit warehouse now. They were busy treating her along with several others who’d been injured on the panicked run in from the armory.

  Osan shook his head. “I wanted to stay outside so I could… you know, see them.”

  The man had no weapons, no pack, no food or water from what we could tell. Still, he looked in relatively good shape. How were any of these people surviving?

  “Compound is secure,” Halo reported almost an hour later. We’d all downed some calories and agreed on a makeshift guard rotation. Hauk had retreated even further since Xero had left. I think we were all counting the minutes until the TriCraft could return.

  “How’s she doing?” I asked the corpsman who was assigned to the survivor. Our eyes met, and I saw the doubt.

  “Stable, but extreme shock.” He stroked a hand through her unkempt hair. It was an unexpected tenderness from one stranger to another. “It’s up to her. She has to decide whether she wants to live or not.”

  I considered that as I moved away. Honestly, I’m not sure what the better outcome for her might be. Osan was finishing a ration pack and smiled when he saw me approaching. In the man’s mind, we had bonded, I guess. In a way, he did remind me a little of my father, but the Asian face and clipped English quickly distanced him from the recent memories of my old man. Osan nodded his head toward the rear of the building. I followed.

  Captain Hauk was already in one of the chairs someone had retrieved and set up on the shipping dock. The ocean breeze felt good, and I could just make out the breakers out past the line of pine trees.

  From somewhere, Osan produced a bottle of bourbon and several disposable cups. “Gentlemen?”

  We both nodded eagerly. It was unprofessional, foolish, and entirely against regulations. Fuck it!!

  My first two shots went down in seconds. Damn, someone had good taste. Sumo came and sat between us. I fished a treat out of a pouch I’d kept for him. It wasn’t as good as my whiskey, but the dog seemed just as happy.

  “I’m sorry about your men, Jordan.”

  Hauk nodded and lifted his cup. “Thanks. We got Xero out of this so…”

  I could tell he wanted to say more, but the pressure of the day had closed in on the man, choking off his ability for conversation. I looked over at the old man.

  “How was it you saved this?” I pointed at the bottle.

  He smiled. “Priorities!”

  “Here, here,” Jordan and I echoed.

  The four of us sat there long into the evening. Sumo barely stirred as we refilled our cups multiple times. Osan finally filled the silence.

  “You know why I like the sea?” He held his cup out toward the breakers. “It’s always changing, but it’s always the same.”

  We were all a bit buzzed by then and saw wisdom where there were really only words. Still, the man continued.

  “I was in the Navy. Met Joann on leave in Corpus Christi. She made me promise we would live here when I retired. I didn’t argue with her. Shoot, anywhere with a seashore was perfect to me. We would go out and walk the beach every morning just to see what had changed, what new treasure the tide had washed in. Most days it was just a new shell or maybe a unique piece of driftwood. Once we found a prop jet from a rocket. You know, one of the old SpaceX launches. I guess that had to be when they moved them out to the Texas facility. Anyway, it was always something new. Nothing exciting… totally ordinary, but they all found a place in our little beach house.”

  ‘Until now,’ was what he didn’t say. Now the tide brought in shit that could kill you. Things that could snatch you from the world of the living.

  We drank the man’s liquor and enjoyed a brief respite from the near continuous battle. What if this was all we had to look forward to? Fighting, survival, being on the run constantly. How many would make it? Was that even a life? Somewhere out to sea we heard a tremendous crash as something large breached the surface and fell heavily back to the depths.

  The thought I’d been avoiding since landing hit me like a sledgehammer. This is no longer our world.

  “Hauk, where was Red-7 coming from?”

  I saw him grimace slightly, not sure if it was from the whiskey or the memory.

  “Lackland,” the man said with finality.

  I was familiar with the base, spent time there early in my Space Force days. Near San Antonio, it was hotter than the middle of hell in the summer. Xero had indicated that was where she had been taken, but I wanted Hauk’s explanation.

  “What was so important there?”

  Jordan Hauk took another sip before resting the cup on his knee. “She was…the HVA.”

  I didn’t want to get into what Xero had told me about the AI project there.

  “How did the city fare?” I asked.

  The man shrugged; he knew which one I meant, the only big one around. “Better than most, worse than some. No direct hits, but no power, no food. You know, lots of gangs popping up. We lost a few men just getting away.”

  My brain automatically calculated distance, terrain, and what I knew of Red-7’s assets.

  “Two hundred fifty miles, mostly on foot. That had to be one hell of a hike, Captain.”

  “Yeah, farther if you aren’t traveling in a straight line.”

  He didn’t add more, but they obviously had made detours. Hauk was not a man of many words, but I was sensing we were reaching an understanding of sorts.

  “What are we doing here?” he finally asked.

  I could hear the bone-tired weariness in the man’s question. “As my pops was fond of saying. ‘We show up… show up and do our damn job.’ We fight, Captain.”

  “And what are we fighting for, Kovach?”

  I didn’t answer immediately. Truthfully, it was a question I’d been asking myself. My eyes focused on a dark shape moving in the surf a hundred yards offshore. I took in the soft snores from the old man as his head nodded over to one side, hand still clutching the half-empty bottle.

  “Survival.” I took a long pull of my drink. “And same as we always have, Jordan. We fight for them.”

  Even from here, the smell of salt air mixed with the sting of rotting meat. The odor of death and decay was now a permanent fixture of our home world.

  “We’re failing,” the other warrior said before rising and walking back inside.

  I sat there in silence stroking my dog’s fur. Hauk wasn’t wrong, but my thoughts went even darker. What do we fight for when everyone is gone?

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  IAS STONE MOUNTAIN

  “Renegades?” Bayou turned away from the console muttering the word. Kovach was always a bit of one, but that had never been an apt description for her. Now, though, this asshole in Fleet Command had condemned her entire squad.

  The ship’s complement was mushrooming. Parts of Hauk’s initial team were aboard, as well as the HVA they were protecting. Kovach had suggested Bayou talk with her as soon as she could. She was trying to come to terms with what to do with the Space Marines they had rescued as well.

  So far, that was mainly what they had been doing, running around picking up surviving soldiers. It wasn’t a bad plan, but Bayou was the one who had to come up with ways to feed everyone and put them to work. Mostly, she’d been handling disputes from each of the armed force branches and nationalities represented. She desperately needed help and could realistically only use those who were trained for working in hard vacuum. Her mind made up, she headed to engineering.

  “You are Xero?”

  Xero nodded and eyed the pile of parts the boy was working on. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Lux,” he answered without looking up. “Do you know anything about building robots?”

  “I know how to make them do stuff but really not much on how to build one, no. Sorry.” She picked up several of the circuit panels; they were all modular, and she’d seen enough of them to know this had to be a vintage model. Probably a loader, certainly not from a combat bot.

  “I’m trying to bring my friend back. Her name was Marcie.”

  “She was a bot?”

  Lux shrugged. “She was a NannyBot, but she was my friend. She saved my life when the… when, you know, the war started.”

  Xero instantly liked the boy; he was mature for his age and seemed to have adapted to shipboard life already. It was unusual for her to engage with anyone, but in the recent crises, she seemed to have found many more people she could work with and even like.

  “There are spare parts and stuff all over the ship,” Lux said. “Not just bots, you know… but all kinds of stuff. Ms. Otero said I could use whatever I find as long as one of her people checks it out first.”

  Xero reached in and fastened a video output connector onto one of the control boards. The readout display on the floor lit up. It amazed her to see it running through a simple diagnostic. The kid had hooked the basics up correctly.