My hand edged slowly out and gently touched Carol’s foot. She had hit the ground about the same time I did. Unlike me, she hadn’t been shot at. At least I didn’t think she had. Her foot was trembling. I took that as a good sign.

  Ada had gone to combat mode. Why she hadn’t spotted the attackers before me was a mystery. I scrolled through the HUD to see where Sumo was. His beacon came up on the far side of my field of view. It was stationary; no doubt he was behind cover like he was trained.

  The voice told me in no uncertain terms to push the rifle away from me with one finger only. They were not advancing, not being reckless. These guys had some training, possibly military. Ada bracketed nine combatants, all spread out on a well-formed arc, each with a clear shooting line on me. So, these were not just the locals jonesing for a fight.

  I pushed the MK4 away as instructed. Yes, I probably could have ended them, but I was less certain I could protect Carol. I saw boots approaching, legs in forest green camo. That could be anything from the national guard to the local deer hunting club.

  “Is this the guy?” The voice came from somewhere above the pair of feet.

  Then a familiar voice said quietly, “Yes.”

  Damiana Voss, that conniving bitch, stole my truck, left me for dead, and now she was in with these guys who apparently wanted to make sure I was dead.

  “Watch out, he has a dog… had a dog.”

  Dammit, she was giving away my ace in the hole.

  “We’ll be fine. The sergeant and I are just going to have a little chat. Ain’t that right, Sarge?”

  My view of the boot was replaced by a face. He was middle-aged, crew cut, missing a right front tooth.

  I’d had enough. I raised up on my hands and then lifted my body up to a prone position, although still on my knees. “It’s Master Sergeant Kovach, and why in the fuck are you shooting live rounds at us?”

  My sudden assertiveness took him by surprise. He was indeed military, as were at least some of the others. He carried a formidable weapon, an old school Stoner 63 autofire that he must have found in a museum. My instant recall updated as quickly as Ada’s battle maps. It fired a 5.56×45mm NATO round that could punch through my armor at this distance. Ada was analyzing the rest of the weapons; only one other was as formidable as this man’s Stoner auto.

  “Whoa there, friend, we just want to understand things. The little woman here says you have been raping her and her friend. She said they got away, but you would be coming to find them. Looks like she was right.”

  Now I had a decision to make. Were these idiots just trying to do the right thing and being duped by a beautiful woman, or were they evil pricks who were spending their last precious breaths pretending to be noble?

  “Look, friend.” I overemphasized the word back to him. “You can believe what you want, but I am not in the mood to kill anyone today, and you probably don’t want to be dead.”

  I was paraphrasing a line from one of my dad’s old movies. A western, I think. It was cheesy, but it seemed to fit. The boot hit me squarely in the chest, rolling me onto my back. It was beginning to seem like they weren’t going to leave me many choices.

  On a good day, I could probably take all of these guys with little trouble. I was better equipped, better trained, and highly motivated. Today was not one of my better days; I’d been feeling the coldness of my body turning in on itself all morning. The doctors had told me increased adrenaline could speed up my body’s metabolism and cause the onset of symptoms sooner.

  “Don’t do that again,” I stated quietly but firmly.

  He tried anyway, and for his effort, he lost part of a leg to my blade. One second my hand was empty, the next the Heidelberg knife was carving out a sizeable chunk of his lower calf. The tendon sliced through; the man dropped the gun, which I caught, flipped, and fired, all in the shattered slivers of a second. The leader was down.

  If any of the others had any combat discipline, they would have A) sought cover and B) returned overwhelming fire. Instead, they chose option C) which was essentially yelling and firing at everything that moved. The only one I was worried about was carrying a vintage model Glisson Mark 1, a solid weapon that could also punch through my armor, depending on the load-out. A silvery gray blur swept in on the man before I could even bring the heavy Stoner around.

  Sumo hit the man, biting into his neck, leaving a gush of red that painted the pavement and the man beside him in hot, sticky gore. I dropped the clumsy machine gun and retrieved my MK4, letting loose multiple shots on several targets. Several small caliber rounds pinged off my suit before one massive blast hit me just under the chin.

  Shit, the screens flickered, and I coughed up blood, coating the inside of my visor. The recirculation system gave a shriek of protest and died. I pushed the helmet back to its storage position. It was now more of a liability to me.

  I saw the man with a single shot hunting rifle, chambering another round. My weapon was no longer in my hands, so I simply charged the man. Not great tactics, essentially nothing on style points, but sheer aggressive audacity sometimes wins. He raised the weapon and was about to fire when I heard a shot from behind me. Red blossomed on the man’s chest and the fight went out of his eyes. I turned and saw Carol holding a rifle. She was trembling, but she might have just saved my life. I nodded and proceeded to kick the next man in the nuts; he went down like a sack of dog shit.

  * * *

  Sumo was just removing the life force from another of the soldiers when I called for a truce. The remaining men knew they were outmatched and seeing Carol shoot one of their own must have made them question their original motivation. They had lost four men, five if we are being honest. I could tell the last one wasn’t going to make it much longer. He had a sucking chest wound. It was probably from me.

  “He never raped us, he was helping us,” Carol said, her tiny voice showing a strength I hadn’t heard before.

  The men just stood there, confused. I motioned for them all to drop their guns. The fight had clearly gone out of them. It was then I realized she was gone. Voss was no longer with our little party. I’d never even seen the woman, only heard her voice.

  “Sumo, hunt.” Then I had to let him know who.

  “Find Damiana.”

  The dog took off.

  “We didn’t know the guy,” one man said as he nursed a nasty gash across one shoulder. He’d clearly just missed getting fatally clipped by a shot.

  “So, you were just following the random soldier for no reason?” It didn’t sound plausible to me, but they trained soldiers to follow orders, even stupid ones from people that should not be in leadership roles.

  “The girl… she…”

  “She was damn convincing, right?”

  I tried a different tactic. “Where were you stationed?”

  Each of the four remaining men looked at each other. I knew that look.

  “Can’t tell me, right?” I had a feeling I knew, not much else around here except maybe a local guard armory, and that wouldn’t typically be staffed by just a patrol squad. These guys were green, probably new recruits.

  “Where were you headed then?”

  “Louisville,” a skinny, black-skinned woman said. “I got family there. We could hole up and at least eat, you know?”

  I shook my head. “You need a better plan.”

  She leaned forward, both wanting and fearing the question she had to ask.

  “What do you know?”

  “I’ll tell you, if you tell me about Rainier.”

  They looked confused. “The Factory.”

  They told me. Like I thought, I didn’t get much, but it might be helpful. They were clearly terrified of the place and simply wanted to be anywhere else. I learned that this was less than a third of the original sentry force. Some of what they had been through sounded even more gruesome than our encounters.

  * * *

  My leg started going numb as I told the young private that her hometown had been nuked, her family most likely all dead or soon would be. She walked away slowly to the north, silver tears cutting trails down her face. I had just pissed on the one chance of hope she’d been clinging to since the missiles fell. I told the others they were free to go but to stay out of fights they didn’t need. I would not be the worst thing they found on the road.

  Sumo returned, his head hanging low. Damiana had somehow slipped past him, and he was unaccustomed to not getting his prey. In the distance, I thought I heard a vehicle moving away. There was more to this woman than she was letting on. My arm twitched, and the coldness settled in even stronger now.

  The signaling chime from Ada interrupted my thoughts. “Master Sergeant, we have a possible fix on the child.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTY-ONE

  My brain may be supercharged, but when it came to decisions like this, it felt like it was working in slow-motion. I needed to tell Carol that Lux may have been located, but that wasn’t enough. What was she going to do, walk there? I tried to activate my helmet again. It attempted to boot, then went dark. The dent in the exterior of the polyceramic shell had killed the built-in circuitry. I clipped it back to its receiver as we began walking south. Thanks to the good doctor, though, I had a back-up. Ada triggered the map I wanted in my internal view, the scene showing up directly in her connection to my brain’s ocular inputs. The locked-in coordinates were on the map. The Rainier location pulsed with a purple dot.

  “Distance?”

  “Sixty-two miles to the location,” Ada said crisply.

  “No. Distance to the boy.”

  The map zoomed out; he was only a state away. In fact, it looked like he might even be on the Tennessee side of a mountainous line.

  “One hundred seventy-eight miles,” the AI replied.

  * * *

  I had her send a message for me.

  Carol had remained mostly silent since the encounter with Damiana and the soldiers. I wasn’t sure if it was the seeing her friend in a new light or taking someone’s life. People deal with betrayal and killing a person in similar ways, but both are rough if you aren’t used to it. I was fighting off the effects of my organ rejection and lagging behind. Carol was far enough ahead that I’m sure she thought I couldn’t hear her crying. Where had Damiana gone, and where was that damn Wraith?

  I jogged to catch up with her. I must have looked rather bizarre, as my back was on fire from the pain. Then, my right leg gave out, and I went down hard. I was twitching badly, and a new pain in my stomach felt like I’d been stabbed. My first thought was another of those damn creatures had attacked, but then I knew this was just my body taking its next step in the slow and agonizing process of dying.

  Carol must have heard me fall, as she was quickly back, cradling my head in an instant. Through the pain, I mouthed almost silent words. The pain was tearing its way through me. It burned and ached and caused every nerve to fire its pain receptors in sequence. Strong tremors rippled through my body.

  Sumo ran over and drove his nose into my neck. His concern was obvious, and a gentle lick told me volumes. I only vaguely sensed him, but the familiarity was comforting despite the untenable agony my body was offering.

  “We…” I tried again to get the words out. Blackness was shrouding my thoughts. I stared up into the trees lining the road. Open pastureland to one side, more of the upscale homes on the other.

  “Lux.”

  That word at least got out. It took nearly five minutes to make Carol understand what I was saying. She kept brushing the sweaty hair from my face, her concern for me obvious, but her thoughts clearly hundreds of miles away with her boy.

  “We… we have to get your meds,” she finally said.

  “I think,” I had to suck in a breath, “I think it might be too late.”

  “No… no!” she said with more conviction.

  I drew in a breath and felt a slight reprieve from the attack on my body. “Yes, we have to go find Lux. If he leaves that spot, he could be impossible to locate again. It’s hundreds of miles of Appalachian Mountains.” I didn’t want to admit that Ada’s evidence seemed pretty thin. I had to give this mother hope.

  She snatched her hand away from the ground as one of the stinging barbs of grass had found exposed flesh. I, too, was feeling them on the back of my neck, but it was insignificant to the agony I was already in.

  “What if there is like here?”

  I knew what she meant; the increasingly wild plant was trying to kill us all. The people, the survivors all with their own fucked-up agendas, as if the violet Thunder Vines weren’t deadly enough. “I don’t know.” I gritted my teeth, determined to get my thoughts out. “We… you have to try.”

  She nodded; I think she finally realized I might not be coming with her. I heard the chirp in my earbuds and knew what that meant. She cried,

  “It will take me days, maybe weeks. No way he will last that long.”

  “No.” Her eyes followed my arm and then out in the direction my finger was pointing. “It won’t.”

  She gasped. I knew what she was seeing, even without turning my head. A thick black triangle of solid matter was now suspended a half a dozen feet above the ground. I felt her hand begin to shake as it rested on my head.

  “It’s my team. They’ll help get you to your boy.”

  “Jesus, Kovach, you look like shit.”

  “No shit, I’m decomposing. Still enough in me to kick your ass, Bishop,” I answered back, feigning a significant level of overconfidence.

  I’d already introduced them to Carol and given the coordinates, but Riggs insisted on checking me out first. The painful episode was improving marginally. I was sitting up again and hadn’t thrown up in a good ten minutes. That was a win in my book.

  “Who’s the new guy?” I motioned with my head to an Asian soldier standing off to one side. He wore our standard kit but had an ROK battle patch on his breastplate.

  “I am Sergeant Dae, sir. It is an honor, sir.”

  The soldier stepped forward and somehow bowed and saluted in the same motion.

  “Your call sign happen to be G-Force?”

  The man’s face lit up; he gave a curt nod. “Yes, they call me Gi.”

  Bayou stabbed a needle into my neck and pressed the plunger home. “You know of him?”

  I was familiar but didn’t want to go into it right now. “He’s a good man, Bayou. Change out that squad patch, though. He needs to be part of us.” I took her hand. “I’m sorry. You know about Smith.”

  She nodded. Truthfully, Smith, whose call sign was Darko, was under my command, but mission commanders take on that responsibility, and Debra was showing the burden not just of his loss but of everything from these last weeks.

  “He was a damn fine soldier, but we’ve all lost people. We will find a way to remember him later, not today,” she said.

  “That’s an affirmative, Bayou.”

  “So, what’s the story, Prowler? What can I do to make this better for you?”

  I looked at my second, unsure exactly how to respond.

  “Take care of my team, get the woman and her son reunited. I’m not sure I can expect much more in the win column.”

  “The soldier I know doesn’t give up like that,” she said quietly, putting away her med kit.

  “Not giving up,” I struggled to say. “I’m just being a realist. You were there last time. You know how bad it got before they evac’d me.” She had been there; she had held onto my hand through a night and a day waiting for the damn dropship to finally locate our beacon.

  “I’m going to that other facility. I’ll do my best to get the meds, then we can make some decisions. Maybe head back up to the Alice Springs.”

  She shook her head. “Someone dropped her out of orbit earlier today. All hands lost.”

  Shit, so the war was still on. Someone was still shooting, but who?

  “No matter what happens, it looks like Banshee squad is on its own for now.”

  * * *

  Whatever Bayou had given me was taking effect. The tremors, cramps, and pain were all subsiding, at least temporarily.

  I saw the look in her eyes. She had reached a decision. She was team lead now; I was unable to make Command decisions. She tapped her cheek to activate the squad comms.

  “Halo, get Prowler’s tac helmet repaired. Gi, bring the Wulf out. You’re with Prowler for this next part of the mission.”

  Then, to me, “Now you have some backup, and your mutt has some firepower. We’ll do a skip crossing to pick up the kid and be back by 0900, deal?”

  We both knew it wasn’t likely to happen, but I nodded in resignation. She leaned over and hugged me, then grabbed her gear and started running back to the TriCraft where that beautiful Wulf transport was rolling down the ramp. No more walking, at least.

  “What if you need the transport?”

  She smiled. “We can use the dropship. Not enough people around to matter anymore, even if keeping it a secret were still a thing.”

  She was right. There were way too few survivors around for what had happened. That was just one of the many questions I had.

  “I know you’ve encountered the vines.” She had already told me they seemed to be taking over every part of the countryside to the east.

  “Yeah,” she nodded sadly, remembering some personal horror.

  “The guys we ran into this morning were from the factory.”

  “The factory?” she asked.

  “It’s the Hammer facility named Ranier that I need to get to. The common name for it is The Nightmare Factory.”

  “Lovely, just what I needed to hear.” She looked back over her shoulder to watch Carol climb up the ramp. “The other woman, her friend. She’s the one who told you about it?”

  I nodded. Thinking about Damiana did raise a lot of questions. Maybe she had just needed me to get her here. Maybe it had nothing to do with them possibly having the meds I needed to stay alive.

  “The plants were not what the guard unit had been worried about. They say they are attracted to movement and sound. As long as you could mask these, you should be okay,” I told Bayou.