The Devil’s Peak II, page 20
Drake grabbed her, running his hand up the smooth curve of her back. The skin was still sun warmed. “I’ve dreamed about this for so long,” he whispered.
“Tonight there is just us.” She reached into the front of his pants, gripping him, and pulling him out. He reared up, so hard he felt like the skin was going to split.
“Oh god,” he said. “I mean, sorry.”
She laughed. “The pleasure of loving is one of our greatest gifts.”
She pushed his pants down, and as she did she sank to her knees in front of him.
***
It was three hours later that Isabella and Drake reappeared. Drake felt happier and more alive than he had in weeks, months, maybe ever.
“Oh boy.” He grinned as he saw the pizza boxes.
On the counter top was stacked four pizzas and the smell was delicious. He looked up at Marco and Leonidas, who were opening a bottle of red wine.
“Please tell me you guys didn’t order yourself two pizzas each?”
Leonidas laughed as the cork popped. “Why, you need to refuel for some reason?” He raised an eyebrow, but then leaned forward as he grew serious. “She is like a sister to us. Remember that.”
Drake nodded and raised a hand. “Good intentions only. She’s a good woman.” He turned to the sound of the washroom door opening. “Probably the best I’ve ever known.”
“Good, we agree,” Marco said.
He pointed to the boxes. “One of each type. They say they’re authentic Italian pizzas, but they always put too much topping on them.” He snorted. “And one of them even had pineapple on it. Blasphemy, I say.”
Drake stood. “Well, lucky for me my favorite is all kinds, so I’ll take any one of them.”
Leonidas handed him a generous red wine, and Drake took two and turned to hand one to Isabella.
She took it, and leaned into him. She raised her glass. “To fighting, and winning. And for the sun to shine on the world once more.”
The four of them drank wine, ate pizza, laughed, and talked about things they’d done and seen in days gone by, and all of them had nothing to do with Hell, the Devil, or evil.
Finally when the food was done, they sank into a few of the sofas. It was getting late, and Drake felt a drowsiness coming over him.
“What now? Where to?” he asked.
“We leave tomorrow morning.” Leonidas stared into his near empty wine glass. “We have been recalled to the Vatican. There has been some new information that may help us.”
“You?” Marco asked.
“I need to go home, and see my brother,” he said. “Tell him I’m okay. Also check on Addison. She went through a lot.” He looked across at each of them. “Did anyone hear from either of them?”
“Yes and no,” Isabella said. “I got a message from Addison, and missed it. I tried to call her back several times, but got no answer. Then I was sidetracked to try and find you. I forgot to follow up. Sorry.”
Drake half smiled. “I’m kinda glad you got sidetracked.”
“You two were close?” Marco asked.
“Ethan and I? Sure were. We were twins,” Drake replied.
Leonidas stood and walked to the small open kitchen. “When he went missing, you went looking for him. You sacrificed a lot. Nearly everything for him.”
“He’d do the same…” Drake began. “Well, he was sick, and has been through a lot.”
Drake turned to Isabella and saw her share a glance with her fellow Knights.
“What?” he asked.
“I’m coming with you,” Isabella said.
“No, you need to check in back home. I don’t need a babysitter.” He held up a hand and waved her down. “He’s been sick, and remember, he and Addison are engaged, so they…”
She tossed him her phone. “Call him.”
He sighed. “Fine.”
He entered the number, and held the phone to his ear. The recorded message answered.
He didn’t leave a message and then tried Addison’s number. He waited and then once again he got a recorded message.
“Not there, either.” He tossed the phone back to her. “I’ll be there tomorrow anyway.”
“We’ll be there tomorrow,” Isabella said. “Besides, I’m dying to see this Stoker Ranch you have been boasting about.”
“No boasting needed.” Drake smiled.
He sunk back into the chair. He should have been feeling mellow, but instead there was nothing but disquiet beginning to bloom in his belly.
CHAPTER 30
The United States, the Pentagon headquarters for the Department of Defense
General Charles Chuck Carter had just left a Joint Chiefs meeting and he had been tasked with the rural eradication of the infected population.
One of his compatriots would be dealing with the urban eradication, which was a far trickier job as there were still uninfected populations in those cities so the fighting would be almost hand to hand, building to building, one damn monstrosity at a time.
Carter’s jaw was set as he was ordered to carry out his battle pan; basically their military assets were going to be turned inwards. There were no real external threats right now, as every country in the world was dealing with the same problem – people were becoming infected. And if they didn’t die, they changed into all manner of horrors. And then infected more people, or fucking ate them.
He ground his teeth as he remembered some of the creatures they had captured for study. They were animated, but not really alive. They had no functioning organs, or flowing blood. They could be taken down with a head shot, but unless you blew every arm and leg off them, and since some of these things had six or eight limbs, then they just kept coming at you.
But fire also worked. Fire burned them and hurt them.
So fire it would be.
The waiting chopper took him directly back to his base of command, and from there, he brought in his senior officers to brief him on any latest developments. And then he delivered his orders.
Carter listened as Colonel Hartford got him up to speed on the different quadrants out in the field – so far they had pulled a few remaining families from roof tops, but from what they could tell, the area was overrun. The hordes moved in massive packs or herds. Thousands of skinless-looking things swarming over hillsides and through valleys, eating anything flesh and blood in their path. And if they caught some stray people, well, they were either torn apart, or assimilated.
He was shown images from drones, and his mouth turned down in revulsion – there were the familiar dog-ape looking things that were naked and looked skinless and glistening wet.
They had flattened faces and long snouts ringed with needle teeth. He hated them all. He had no pity for them as he knew their humanity had left them, and what was moving them now wasn’t a person, but something evil, something that needed to be eradicated.
But the new development was when they moved through the heavier forested areas. They said there were giant things moving from tree to tree – flying. It seemed some of them had taken to the sky.
That was on top of the multi legged beasts like giant crabs that were when two, three, or more beings seemed melted together as a single entity. It seemed the horrors never ended.
Once his team had finished briefing him, it was his turn and he laid out the battle plans – they would enact multiple high speed bombing runs and use the latest thermobaric weapons. The plan was to incinerate anything moving out there.
He looked at each of the men and women before continuing. “Without this plan, we estimate that worst case scenario we will soon be fighting hand to hand. We don’t want that. So, we need to slow these things down. Thin the herd, so to speak.”
“Sir, we aren’t a hundred percent certain that there aren’t living people still stuck out there,” Captain Marine Henandez said. “Can we deploy rapid evac choppers in the event we locate non-infected, sir?”
Carter turned. “I wish we could. But that would slow us down, cause us to be selective in our targeting. Right now, their side is growing by hundreds or thousands a day. When I said hand-to-hand fighting, you can read that as we would be overrun in a day. I don’t want that to happen, do you?”
Henandez shook her head. “No sir.”
Carter nodded to her. Fact is, he felt the same as she and probably all of them did. There were some poor saps trapped out there waiting for a rescue that was never going to come.
“We have a job to do. A dirty one. Clear your minds, and just focus on saving the United States.” He straightened. “The fightback starts here. Understood?”
The group all came to attention. “Sir, yes sir.”
“I can’t hear you!” General Carter barked.
His officers roared like first year cadets.
He nodded. Good, he thought. There were some long and damned dirty days ahead. Motivation matters.
“Prepare your pilots, and let’s get that munitions loaded.” Carter saluted sharply and left the room.
As Carter strode down the corridor he thought through their strategy and what they had learned from previous events.
Following the devastating internal breach that led to their own bomber pilot trying to turn back on the base, each pilot now had to undergo an optic scan – one of the things they found with the ‘changed’ monstrosities, was they had a little something extra in their eye. It was a new growth, just like in nocturnal animals that gave them the ‘shining’ effect seen in the back of their eyes. They had grown a reflective layer just like the tapetum lucidum in wolves, bats, big cats, and other night beasts. In effect, it gave the monsters night vision.
The mission before them was simple – the drones would seek out the large moving herds of the Orcs, as the crews were calling them now, and then they would use F-22 and F-35 stealth fighter jets, chosen as they can carry weapons internally in weapons bays, and big enough for loading the larger thermobaric weapons.
The thermobaric devices were also known as fuel-air explosives or vacuum bombs, and were a type of explosive that consumed atmospheric oxygen to sustain combustion, creating a powerful blast wave and high-temperature fireball. They covered larger areas, were less impactful on buildings or surroundings, but devastating on softer targets – like people, Orcs, or anything else that couldn’t get out of the kill zone.
General Carter took to the main control and observation room to watch the mission. The current monitoring technology was a combination of satellite imagery and drone eyes-in-the-sky that meant everything was like a video game. It was all up on screen from multiple angles.
“Jesus,” he said softly, when one of the larger Orc herds was spotted.
Carter exhaled slowly. There must have been thousands of them, tens of thousands, moving over the countryside in a dark wave. It was hard for him to get his head around that not long ago these were normal human beings, people just living their lives.
He also noticed out in front of the monstrous wave a herd of deer, rabbits, and other critters tried to stay ahead of them. It seemed that human beings weren’t the only thing on the Orcs’ menu.
“Target acquired,” came the monotone voice over the speaker from the first of the fighters.
The sleek fighter came in fast, low, and released its payload.
Pickle away, the pilot said, and then banked hard.
The device didn’t need to impact with the ground to explode, as they were designed for an air, or atmospheric detonation.
The bomb detonated, inhaled oxygen, and then the pyroclastic-style blast heated up the air and ground beneath it for hundreds of feet in all directions.
Carter squinted as the bomb’s blinding flash whited out screens for a second or two, and then when they came back, he saw it exhale its dragon’s breath over the landscape.
After a few seconds, the second plane dropped its payload over another area, and the same for the third. Half a mile of the ground covered in countless thousands of beasts was obliterated.
“Returning to base,” came the final words from the lead pilot.
Carter stood, and folded his arms. He watched as everything burned, and the cloud and dust began to settle. The ground was scorched black, and he knew the surface would be melted to glass down there.
There would also be a sooty, greasy residue – the remnants of tens of thousands of pounds of flesh that was near vaporized.
He narrowed his eyes. It looked like a good result. But he couldn’t say mission accomplished just yet. They would be performing these types of bomb runs night and day for as long as it took. There were millions of these things out there now, and each one of them through a single bite spread the parasitic infection and had the ability to make more of themselves.
They could not be reasoned or bargained with; they could only be killed. Or they would kill or convert us, he knew there was nothing in between.
The dust and smoke started to settle and the drones came back like a swarm of mosquitos to hover overhead and begin photographing everything. There was a ground zero for a thousand feet across charred black and nothing was left standing in there – not a stick of a tree, blade of grass, or living being. Then outside of that there were charred bodies, and just beyond that a few moving creatures that were significantly mobility degraded.
Beyond that the herd was moving away, scattering. He estimated they must have taken out tens of thousands of them. He knew that soon the dispersed herd would coalesce again. And then they would strike again.
Carter nodded his satisfaction as he looked back at the amplified images of ground zero point again where the ground looked like black glass. He was about to turn away when he thought he saw movement.
He concentrated, and his brows slowly came together.
Then it was confirmed.
“Movement!” one of the controllers said.
Carter walked closer to the huge screen. “How? How does anything living survive that?”
Colonel Rennie came and stood beside him. “How do you kill something that wasn’t alive to begin with?”
From various areas tiny eruptions of red began to appear. There was something pushing up through the glass-like ground and rising up.
“Amplify that!” Carter ordered.
The camera zoomed in.
It looked like a questing tendril or tree root. But it was blood red.
“Take the drones in lower,” he said.
Several of the drones dropped to within fifty feet of the ground.
“Surface temperature is still at over two-fifty degrees,” intoned one of the operators.
“Nothing can live in that. I mean, nothing that was there before.” Carter folded his arms. “What the hell is that stuff?”
The red tendrils got to about five feet in height, looking like a forest of them now, and then they collapsed to the earth. They quested along the ground, branching, and covering it in a red mesh, like some sort of gigantic branching mold.
“Those things we just fried,” Colonel Rennie said, “their bodies were incinerated and turned to dust. But it seems that debris has worked itself into the soil and is somehow growing like seeds.”
“This is not fucking possible,” Carter seethed and paced away.
“What do you want to do?” Rennie asked.
Carter turned. “Suggestions?”
Rennie looked up. “Hit it again.”
Carter pointed to the mission controller. “Another bomb run, on the same coordinates, ASAP. Whatever that shit is, I do not want it spreading over God’s green earth on my watch.”
The men watched as the mission parameters were relayed and another jet armed and scrambled. It took just fifteen minutes before the plane was on its way, and by then the red mesh, looking like blood filled veins, covered the earth.
The pilot didn’t hesitate, and the target was clear. The thermobaric weapon detonated over the site and the drones had pulled well back. Their screens whited-out again for several moments but then when they cleared the group watched and waited in silence for the outcome.
Carter paced.
“Visuals up,” a voice said from behind him and the General turned.
Once again the ground was blackened glass, and there was no sign of the red veins.
Carter held his breath.
But then the word he dreaded.
“Movement.”
He stared, his brows drawn together so sharply, he was giving himself a headache.
Sure enough, a tiny red tendril was coming up.
He exhaled and shook his head. “We have a problem.”
CHAPTER 31
USA, Texas, the Stoker Ranch
Drake sat in the huge SUV at the front gates to his massive property. Beside him Isabella stared out the front window.
“This is weird.” He frowned. “There’s usually a small army of people that work here.”
“Maybe Ethan let them all go,” Isabella suggested.
Drake shook his head. “No way; some of those workers have been with us for years. They worked for my dad and were practically family. There’s no way he’d fire anyone.”
“Well then, where is everyone?” Isabella asked.
“Let’s find out.” Drake headed in through the already open iron gates. The wrought iron above them on an arch spelled out ‘STOKER’ in iron-worked calligraphy.
The driveway was long leading up to the main homestead house, a large two-story building with huge front and back porch, lots of sandstone and wooden beams.
As he came close he saw that there was a designated place for his employees’ vehicles to park, and they were all there.
“I don’t get it. Seems everyone is here for duty, but nobody is coming out.” Drake stopped the car and his hand hovered over the horn getting ready to give it a double toot as he normally did to let people know he was home.
His hand hung there for a moment and he lowered it. For some reason, his former Special Forces senses were coming to the fore, and they were telling him that stealth might be the better option right now.
“Front door is open,” Isabella said.
“I see it,” he said.
He turned to her. “You should…”
