Out of the Dark

  “Rob.” The driver had climbed out of his vehicle. He held up his right hand, showing a padlock key, then pocketed the key and extended the now empty hand to Wilson. “I swear, that damned ‘driveway’ of yours gets steeper every time I drive up it!”

  “Dennis,” Wilson said, stepping close enough to take the proffered hand . . . which happened to put him close enough to unobtrusively make sure the driver had been alone in his car. He gripped the hand firmly, then glanced over his shoulder at the cabin with a slight nod. “Wondered when you were going to drop by. Are you and Millie okay? You need to be thinking about moving in up here?”

  “Things aren’t that bad . . . yet, anyway,” Dennis Vardry told his third cousin. He reclaimed his hand and used it to push his hat onto the back of his head, then looked around and grimaced. “You know, I thought you and Dave were just plain nuts when you started working on this place. Mind you, Millie and I’ve enjoyed ourselves up here more’n once, specially since you seeded that pond of yours with trout and put in the picnic shelter. Now, though. . . .”

  “Yeah,” Dvorak agreed, stepping out onto the cabin’s front porch. The two shepherds pushed past him, no longer growling, and bounded up to Vardry to demand he pet them. “We thought we were nuts, too. In fact, I wish we had been.”

  “You and me, both,” Vardry said, reaching down to cuff Merlin gently and affectionately before Nimue stood up with her feet on his shoulders so he could scratch her chest. He noted the rifle in Dvorak’s hands, just as he’d already noticed the automatic on his cousin’s hip, but he didn’t mention either weapon.

  And just as they didn’t mention the fact that he was wearing a sidearm . . . and had a Ruger Mini-14 racked in his SUV.

  “You sure you and Millie are okay?” Dvorak asked. Dennis and Mildred Vardry had no children, and Mildred was wheelchair-bound from an early adolescent spinal injury. She was about as indomitable as people came, but he knew her disability had to be worrying Dennis a lot more than it ever had before. “You know,” he went on, “Rob and I always figured the two of you should count on having a roof over your head here if the wheels ever came off. Not just because you’ve been keeping an eye on the place for us, either. Family’s family, Dennis.”

  “I know.” Vardry nodded, although from his tone it was obvious he’d been touched by the offer. “I know, and if it gets bad enough, believe me, we’ll come a-running. In fact, I may dump Millie up here whether she wants to come or not if it starts looking really ugly. And it may. Boy howdy, it may.”

  “You’ve been watching the Internet, too?” Dvorak asked.

  “Yep.” Vardry shook his head. “Sounds like things are going bad to worse. You heard about Charlotte?”

  “We heard,” Wilson confirmed grimly.

  Nobody was positive what had provoked it, but the Internet consensus was that it had probably been another of the local ambushes the “Shongairi” seemed to have been stumbling into. Apparently “Fleet Commander Thikair” hadn’t been kidding when he said he was prepared to launch as many additional kinetic strikes as it took to make humanity yield. Whether he’d thought he was getting the guilty parties or had simply decided to issue a terrifying example to discourage future attacks had mattered very little to the portion of the North Carolina city’s people who hadn’t evacuated. No one knew how many of those 1.7 million people in the city’s metro area had still been there at the time, but however many had, the aliens had made a clean sweep. According to a witness from Mecklenburg County who’d been far enough (barely) outside the blast zone to survive, there’d been eleven separate impacts, and the JPEGs of the ruins he’d posted the next day looked like something from the far side of the moon.

  “Well, I just heard from a friend of mine in the State Highway Patrol that this ‘Thikair’ bastard’s been in direct contact with the Governor. Him or one of his flunkies, anyway. Seems like he’s telling the Governor what happened to Charlotte could happen to Raleigh if he doesn’t make all of his people ‘submit’ to this damned empire.”

  “I can’t say I’m surprised to hear it,” Dvorak said after a moment. “It’s part of the pattern, as far as I can see.” Vardry looked at him, and he shrugged. “It doesn’t seem like he’s had a lot of success figuring out who’s left on the national level.” Dvorak bared his teeth for a moment. “The son-of-a-bitch has even been posting open messages on the Internet, trying to get somebody to come forward. But it looks like he did too good a job of killing off the government—either that or whoever’s left is too smart to come out into the open and talk to him. He can’t find anybody to make them formally surrender to him, anyway. So now it looks like he’s reaching down to the state level.” He laughed harshly. “I don’t think he’s going to have a lot of luck in South Carolina, given the way the bastard took out Columbia in the first wave.”

  “I think you’re right about that,” Vardry said after a moment. “And according to my friend, Governor Howell doesn’t think he’s got any choice but to do whatever he’s told.”

  “I can see where it might be a little hard to argue with someone who’s just killed off twenty percent or so of your citizens,” Wilson said grimly.

  “Me, too.” Vardry nodded, then shrugged. “Haven’t heard anything about ‘submitting’ through my own ‘chain of command’ yet. I figure it’s coming, as soon as these bastards do find somebody they think can give the order. In the meantime, though, something’s come up.”

  His tone had changed with the final sentence, and Dvorak felt his mental ears pricking.

  “What kind of ‘something’?” he asked.

  “This fellow knocked on my door last night,” Vardry said. “Never saw him before in my life, but he said he’d been looking for me. Or, rather, looking for you, Rob.”

  “Me?” Wilson’s surprise was evident, and Vardry shrugged.

  “Says he’s a friend of yours. Says his name’s Mitchell.”

  “Mitchell?” Wilson repeated. “Sam Mitchell?”

  “That’s what he says. What his ID says, too, for that matter. Big fella, black hair going gray, two, three inches taller even than Dave here, shoulders like a damned wall.”

  “That sure sounds like him,” Wilson agreed. “Everybody calls him ‘Big Sam’ for a reason. He’s a cop from the Greenville PD.”

  “Yeah, it does sound like him,” Dvorak agreed with a nod. “He’s one of the regulars at the range, Dennis. Wins a hell of a lot of pizza from people who don’t think he can punch out an X-ring holding a handgun upside down and firing with his little finger.”

  “Well, he sure sounded like he knew you two,” Vardry acknowledged.

  “You say he’s looking for me?”

  “Yep. He says you mentioned something about a cabin up here in Nantahala, and something else about having a cousin who was a ranger. So apparently he’s spent the last couple of weeks putting two and two together until he finally came up with me. He wanted me to put him in touch with you, but I figured before I gave anyone directions to your little hidey-hole, I’d best come make sure you’d be happy to see him.”

  Dvorak looked at Wilson.

  “Is there any reason we shouldn’t be happy to see him, Rob?”

  “I can’t think of one right offhand,” Wilson replied slowly. “Sam’s all right. You know that. Hell, I’ve known him for—what? Going on twelve years now.” He looked back at his cousin. “He’s a good cop, Dennis.”

  “He may be a cop,” Vardry said, “but he’s wearing desert camo right now.”

  “Well, he’s South Carolina Guard, too,” Wilson said. “Military police unit—132nd Military Police Company, I think.” He grinned. “We always gave each other grief about that. Him being Army and me being Marines, I mean.”

  “Do you think it means anything that he’s in camo right now?” Dvorak asked thoughtfully.

  “Hell, Dave, I don’t know!”

  “Actually,” Vardry said dryly, “I think it means quite a bit.”

  “Why?” Dvorak’s eyes had n
arrowed, and the ranger shrugged.

  “Because according to him, the reason he’s looking for you—or for Rob, at least—is because my loose-lipped cousin appears to’ve mentioned that the two of you were building your own version of the Ark up here in the mountains.”

  “He wants to join us?” Dvorak couldn’t quite keep the dismay out of his voice. He and Rob had never made any particular secret—among their friends, at least—about what they were doing, although they’d seldom gone into any great detail. Now he suddenly found himself wondering how many more of those friends might be thinking in the direction of the North Carolina mountains.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Vardry said. “It’s more a case of his looking for someplace to drop something off, though.”

  “Drop what off?” Wilson demanded in the tone of someone who was heading towards exasperation. His thoughts were obviously moving along the same line as Dvorak’s.

  “You guys remember that Homeland Security ‘drill’ that just happened to get called right before everything went to hell, right?” Vardry looked back and forth between the brothers-in-law, and both of them nodded with more than a hint of impatience. “Well, his unit got called up for it. Most of them were in Columbia when the Shongairi hit it, but he and four of his buddies had been sent on some kind of errand. I’m not sure how it all worked out, but the bottom line is that he’s got a couple of deuce-and-a-halfs loaded with stuff these floppy-eared bastards really wouldn’t like him to have. And he’s looking for someplace to stash some of it.”

  . XVIII .

  Stephen Buchevsky felt his body trying to ooze out even flatter as the grinding, tooth-rattling vibration grew louder on the far side of the ridgeline. He hated the sensation, yet at the same time he was grateful for it—just as he hated having exactly zero ammunition for the 40-millimeter M203 grenade launcher that was usually attached to his M16A4 yet felt unspeakably grateful that at least he had plenty of ammo for the rifle itself.

  His attention remained fixed on the “sound” of the alien recon drone, but a corner of his mind went wandering back over the last week and a half.

  He’d managed to avoid any contact with Serbian civilians and gotten his small party of Americans across the Danube and into Romania. That had taken them the better part of three days . . . and no sooner had they reached the far side of the river than they’d come across the remains of a couple of platoons of Romanian infantry who had been caught in column on the road. It was obvious they’d been surprised by an air attack—presumably from the Shongair equivalent of helicopter gunships of some sort. It was the first chance he’d had to see the effect of Shongair weapons, and it had been something of a relief to discover that most of the Romanians had been killed by what looked like standard bullet wounds rather than some sort of death ray, but there’d also been a handful of craters with oddly glassy interiors from obviously heavier weapons.

  They’d found no survivors, and from the distribution of the bodies, it was clear their attackers had pursued and picked off everyone who’d lived through the initial strike as they’d tried to scatter into the cover of the nearby forest.

  It had been a grim discovery, yet the Romanians’ disaster had represented unlooked-for good fortune for Buchevsky’s ill-assorted command. There’d been plenty of personal weapons to salvage, as well as hand grenades, more light antiarmor weapons, and MANPAD SAMs—the Russian-designed SA 14 “Gremlin” varient—than they could possibly have carried. They’d even been able to supply themselves with canteens and a couple of weeks of rations. Best of all, in a lot of ways (as far as Buchevsky was concerned, anyway), was that the current Romanian-produced version of the Soviet bloc AK-74 had been chambered to 5.56-millimeter NATO after Romania joined the alliance. He’d been afraid he’d have to give up his M16, but the Romanian troops had been well supplied with ammo which suited his own weapon just fine. Now every member of his party of refugees had at least his or her own rifle, and most of them were equipped with Makarov 9-millimeter semiauto pistols, as well. There’d also been a mortar section attached to one of the platoons, but he’d passed (not without some regret) on taking any of their weapons along. They’d been equipped with 82-millimeter weapons, each of which weighed upward of forty pounds, and each mortar bomb weighed close to eight pounds. Given everything they already had to carry, their total lack of transport, and the fact that the last thing he wanted to do was to get into some sort of sustained firefight with the Shongairi, he couldn’t possibly have justified the encumbrance. Besides, it made a lot more sense to him to use what weight-carrying capability they had on MANPADs and LAWs.

  On the other hand, if they did find themselves forced to fight—whether against the aliens or against belligerent locals—they were far better equipped than he’d ever really hoped they might be.

  That was the good news. The bad news was that there’d clearly been a major exodus from most of the towns and cities following the aliens’ ruthless bombardment. They’d spotted several large groups—hundreds of people, in some cases. Most of them had been accompanied by at least some armed men, and they hadn’t seemed inclined to take chances. Probably most of them were already aware of how ugly it was going to get when their particular group of civilians’ supplies started running out (if they hadn’t already), and whatever else they might have been thinking, none of them had been happy to see thirty-three armed strangers in desert camo.

  Foreign desert camo.

  A few warning shots had been fired, one of them with sufficiently serious intent to notch the top of PFC Lyman Curry’s left ear, and Buchevsky had taken the hint. Still, he had to at least find someplace where his own people could establish a modicum of security while they went about the day-to-day business of surviving.

  That was what he’d been hunting for today, moving through the thickly wooded mountains, staying well upslope from the roads running through the valleys despite the harder going. Some of his people, including Sergeant Ramirez, had been inclined to bitch about that at first. Buchevsky hadn’t really minded if they complained about it as long as they did it, however, and even the strongest objections had disappeared quickly when they’d discovered the massacred Romanian platoons and realized just how important overhead concealment was.

  Especially after they’d encountered the alien recon drones for themselves.

  From the odd, dark-colored flying objects’ behavior, Buchevsky figured they were something like the US military’s Predators and other UAVs: small, unmanned aircraft used for reconnaissance. What he didn’t know was whether or not they were armed—a question which possessed a certain urgency, given those glassy-looking craters. It was always possible it had been drones just like them—or their more warlike cousins, perhaps; even today, only a minority of US drones were armed, after all—who’d caught those Romanians on the road. Nor did he have any idea whether or not his salvaged shoulder-fired SAMs would work against them, and he had no pressing desire to explore the possibility unless it was absolutely a matter of life or death.

  Fortunately, although the odd-looking, bulbous little flyers were fast, they weren’t the least bit stealthy. Whatever propelled them produced a heavy, persistent, tooth-grating vibration. That wasn’t really the right word for it, and he knew it, but he couldn’t come up with a better term for a sensation that was felt, not heard. And whatever it was, it was detectable from beyond visual range.

  He’d discussed it with Staff Sergeant Truman and PO/3 Jasmine Sherman, their sole Navy noncom. Truman was an electronics specialist, and Sherman wore the guided missile and electronic wave rating mark of a missile technician. Between them, they formed what Buchevsky thought of as his “brain trust,” but neither woman had a clue what the aliens used for propulsion. What they did agree on was that humans were probably more sensitive to the “vibration” it produced than the aliens were, since it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense for anyone to produce a reconnaissance platform they knew people could hear from beyond visual range.

  Buchevsky wa
sn’t going to bet the farm on the belief that his people could “hear” the drones before the drones could see them, however. Which was why he’d waved his entire group to ground when the telltale vibration came burring through the fillings in his teeth from the ridgeline to his immediate north. Now if only—

  That was when he heard the firing . . . and the screams.

  It shouldn’t have mattered. His responsibility was to his own people. To keeping them alive until he somehow got them home . . . assuming there was any “home” for them. But when he heard the shouts, when he heard the screams—when he recognized the shrieks of terrified children—he found himself back on his feet.

  He turned his head, saw Calvin Meyers watching him, and then he swung his hand in a wide arc and pointed to the right.

  A dozen of his people stayed right where they were—not out of cowardice, but because they were too confused and surprised by his sudden change of plans to realize what he was doing—and he didn’t blame them. Even as he started forward, he knew it was insane. The majority of the C-17’s passengers had been support personnel, not combat troops. Less than half his people had actual combat experience, and five of them had been tankers, not infantry. No wonder they didn’t understand what he was doing!

  Meyers had understood, though, and so had Ramirez—even if he was an Army puke—and Lance Corporal Gutierrez, Corporal Alice Macomb, and half a dozen others.

  Buchevsky started forward, and they followed him in a crouching run.

  • • • • •

  Platoon Commander Rayzhar bared his canines as his troopers advanced up the valley. He’d been on this accursed planet for less than seven local days, and already he’d come to hate its inhabitants as he’d never hated before in his life. They had no sense of decency, no sense of honor! They’d been defeated, Cainharn take them! The Shongairi had proven they were the mightier, yet instead of submitting and acknowledging their inferiority like any rational sentient, they persisted in their insane attacks!