EMERGENCE Extinction (Emegence Series Book 5) Page 5

  Dorr pulled his chair up closer to the laptop, arching his back. “Admiral, what are your thoughts on using the existing Navy personnel here combined with civilians who have sailing and seafaring experience to create small boat teams that can be employed for rapid-response units along the coast?”

  “That could work if you have the resources.” Halsey said the words slowly, contemplating the implications, then he held his chin up while tapping on another laptop to his right. “From the looks of it, there are seven more Coast Guard cutters like the vessel you are on now that were stationed in the Gulf. Most of these are medium-sized vessels that formerly required a crew of seventy-five along with fifteen officers. They’d be ideal staging sites with the rear helipad and with their search-and-rescue capabilities. However, you would know better than I what your current pool of personnel are capable of and just how many cutters you could commandeer.”

  “Perfect for our incoming helos, which have been using the commercial frigates in our armada to land on,” said Vaccaro.

  “And the access codes to the vessels—can you provide those?” said Dorr.

  “Yes, I’ll send over the physical locations of the ships and the codes.” He narrowed his eyes at the other screen. “It looks like two of them were docked at the Coast Guard Station in Gulf Shores, Alabama, so those may have fewer hostiles on board to contend with, and they may have even been there getting refueled when the pandemic struck.”

  He continued tapping on his laptop, occasionally pausing to tap his finger on his desk while studying the screen.

  “There are also three dozen of the 47-Foot MLBs docked there. These are motorized lifeboats designed as a first-response resource for the Coast Guard in high seas and harsh coastal environments. These things are astounding and were built to handle a rescue at sea even under the most difficult circumstances. Plus, they don’t consume as much gas as a lot of Navy boats in the same size range.”

  “Which leads us perfectly into our last topic of conversation: fuel,” said Dorr.

  “Gentlemen, this is where I will have to leave you. I have a video-meeting with what remains of the governments in Peru and South Africa to discuss them obtaining samples of the bioagent from us. Thank you for your time. General Dorr, please keep me informed of any further developments.”

  Dorr continued as Hemmings’ image disappeared from his screen. “At present, we have three civilian fuel tankers in our fleet here and one in your Atlantic armada, General Vaccaro. This will keep our ships and helos operational at their current tempo for the next two months. My intel staff have identified a dozen other fueling stations around the Gulf, but those are around major cities and sure to be rife with paras, so any suggestions, Admiral, would be welcome.”

  “There are several offshore platforms south of Texas to consider, but whether those fuel lines will still be functional is a big unknown since they rely on computer automation. The other resource is on the outskirts of New Orleans. The barges and tankers there, hauling their payloads up the Mississippi, all used the refueling station. It is outside of the New Orleans city limits, just far enough to hopefully lessen the presence of creatures.”

  Halsey flipped down his other laptop and faced the main screen. “The other concern regarding fuel that we all have to worry about is what to do once we reach the nine-month mark from when the pandemic began. Any fuel sitting in tankers, barges, or pumps will begin to degrade by then, rendering it useless. It might even become a detriment if it’s put into a helo, truck, or ship at sea.”

  “Unless we can locate one of the smaller refineries and keep it operational in the meantime, and that is no small task,” said Vaccaro. “And even then, it will only be able to meet regional needs.”

  Dorr folded his arms, his ribs constricting with each breath. Another goddamn hurdle—as if the other roadblocks weren’t enough to contend with. He shook his head, thinking of how the entire eastern seaboard had already suffered a crippling cyber-attack on the energy grid, and now the military was going to be faced with another sobering reality as the end of summer approached. So, even if we win the war against the paras, we might still be thrust into a nineteenth-century existence.

  He tried to form a faint grin. He knew none of them had the solution at present, and nine months seemed like an eternity away. Dorr looked beyond his laptop at the half-used bottle of bourbon on his bookshelf, waiting for this meeting to be over. “Well, then, gentlemen, we may all be looking at being inlanders after this battle is over. We might even be greeting our troops next summer from the back of a horse.”

  Chapter 6

  “I’ve got eyes on the front entrance,” whispered Reisner into his mic as he knelt in a cluster of bushes a hundred yards from the entrance of the Magnolia Gardens greenhouse. “I’m not seeing any signs of activity along the grounds or through the windows.”

  Pacelle’s voice responded. “The heat signature we picked up earlier this morning was faint and then disappeared. It could’ve been a glitch, as we’ve not had that happen before.”

  Or it could be exactly what we’re hoping for—clues that lead to Roland Whitmore. He felt his neck hair stand up. Or we could be walking straight into an ambush.

  After spending the morning doing a recon mission on the northeastern edge of Charleston, Reisner received word from Pacelle that an intermittent heat signature of an alpha had been detected at their current location. That the signal kept coming and going was intriguing enough, but the fact that there weren’t any drones located within ten miles of the alpha made things even more puzzling.

  Reisner glanced at his operatives on either side, wishing they had more manpower for whatever they were about to face inside. Ivins’ team was currently deployed in Biloxi, Mississippi to retrieve scientific equipment, and the two other closest strike teams had just inserted into the town of Augusta, Georgia, a hundred miles to the northwest—to Reisner it felt more like they were a continent away. Since Dorr had streamlined the strike teams due to dwindling personnel after the battle at MacDill, Reisner was feeling the absence of Ivins and his SEALs. Now, he was down to Connelly, Porter, Nash, and two new members, Gomez and Wexler. Paul Gomez was a former Army Ranger whose brushcut black hair was in stark contrast to the faint red stubble on his face. Anthony Wexler was as wiry as he was tall, with a comma-shaped scar under his right ear from a combat deployment in Afghanistan when he served with MARSOC. He was fond of informing the rest of the group of the importance of the Marines in battles throughout recent history.

  Reisner looked at the two men, knowing they were solid warriors but feeling like his strike team couldn’t drop any further in numbers without jeopardizing the safety of the entire group and reducing operational efficiency. Gone are the days when I could request a budget increase from Runa and pick up more recruits.

  Reisner scanned the grounds around the building again, feeling reasonably confident that there weren’t any paras but wondering what surprises they would find inside. “Proceeding to the front entrance,” he said, glancing at the rest of his team spread around the massive greenhouse. Connelly and Porter followed on his heels. Nash and Wexler took the rear door while Gomez remained perched on the roof of a maintenance building with his sniper rifle.

  Reisner paused at the arched overhang above the entrance, examining the muddy tracks that headed off into the forest. He recalled some of his brief experience being embedded with a group of army combat trackers in Afghanistan but knew Gomez was the better mantracker in the group, given his work tracking insurgents in the Middle East. He wished the operator was down here now, but even Reisner could tell that the tracks were made in the last few hours before sunrise, since the rain had stopped then, and these prints were lacking pock marks. An uneven gait pattern and discordant stride was another clue that these were alphas—and lots of them.

  “Be advised—multiple tangos were just at this location,” he whispered into his mic. He tried to swallow, his mouth going dry, wondering if they would have enough ammo and grenades
to tangle with a large contingent of crazed demons bent on their destruction. He felt his pulse quicken as he reached for the door handle.

  Swinging the solid steel door open, Porter darted inside, followed by Connelly, then Reisner, snaking through the corridor in a fluid motion borne of hundreds of missions together. Clearing the four offices on either side, they entered a narrow hallway that led to the main greenhouse and headed towards the intense sunlight at the terminus ahead. Again, Reisner could see evidence of muddy footprints coming and going, interspersed with a few shoe prints, and he knew from past experience that that usually meant human captives.

  Entering the main room, Reisner was suddenly hit with the nauseating odor of rotting flesh. In the corner next to a leaking water spigot were the remains of probably a dozen bodies, lying face down with their lower backs shredded open by the kidneys and adrenal glands. One of the figures was untouched, her body resting against the brick wall, apart from the others, her glassy eyes staring at the ground. God, I hope you didn’t witness the horrors that unfolded here before you died. Her skin was nearly translucent, but there were none of the usual signs of parasites under her skin that he’d seen on infected humans.

  Nash’s team entered from the rear door to the right, indicating their route was clear. Reisner slightly lowered his rifle, looking around the greenhouse, which resembled more of a tiger’s den after feeding time than a serene setting for fostering native plants.

  Reisner moved closer to the deceased woman, kneeling down and examining her body. Connelly stood over his right shoulder, pulling up a neck gaiter over her mouth as her pale face grew taut. She pointed to the woman’s right forearm. “Those small puncture marks look like they’re from an IV.”

  Reisner thought back to the macabre findings in the wine cellar at Roland’s estate, wondering if this was the woman who was experimented on there. Is that why they didn’t tear you apart too? Were your blood and body already too much like theirs?

  He tilted his head back. “Nash—take a look at this.”

  Nash squatted beside him, staring at the puncture wounds on the soft white flesh on her inner forearm. He removed a flashlight and examined her eyes then her ears and palpated her torso, working his way down to her stomach. He gently patted her with his gloved hands, focusing on the lower abdomen then lifting her shirt up just above her navel.

  “What is it?” said Reisner.

  “Could just be post-mortem bloating—can’t be sure—but this woman could have been in her first trimester.”

  “Maybe the one who was held captive at Roland’s place in Savannah?” said Reisner.

  Nash flared an eyebrow up. “No way to tell for sure, but her skin and muscles feel…“ He paused while tapping on her forearm. “Spongy, just like the paras do after they’re dead.”

  “Maybe whatever they did to her was too much of a shock to her system. Trying to give her transfusions of their blood was more than she could handle,” said Connelly.

  Reisner felt his head pounding and his stomach churning, unsure if it was from the smell in the room or the revolting way this woman met her end. These creatures are fucking insects that just need to be exterminated.

  Pacelle’s anxious voice penetrated Reisner’s earpiece. “Bravo Team, be advised that there is an intermittent heat signature two hundred meters to your north, heading towards the river.”

  Reisner looked at the muddy prints by the narrow exit door to the left, noting the faint beads of moisture around the edge of the tracks. He was too distracted by the dead woman to notice it earlier. “Shit, they must have just fled.”

  He bolted to the door, kicking it open and carefully stepping out while sweeping the treeline with his rifle. Trotting towards the forest, he had to hop around a revolting array of mangled arms and entrails. He radioed Gomez to meet them around the other side of the building. Once in the forest, he could see a single-file line of bare footprints that corresponded with the direction of travel Pacelle indicated.

  Once Gomez arrived, they began the pursuit, trot-walking along an old deer path. One hundred meters in, the trail meandered into a swamp. The surface of the water before him was murky with brown sediment swirling from the recent passage of the creatures. Pacelle only said one heat signature, but everything else I’ve seen so far is telling me there’s a hell of a lot more alphas, so why haven’t they attacked us yet?

  The only way across the swamp was to plow through the knee-deep water, which would place his team at a grave tactical disadvantage. The paras must know that.

  He turned around, using hand signals to indicate he and Porter would be entering the swamp while the rest should take up shooting positions where they were.

  Stepping into the chilly waters, Reisner had to move each foot with force to break it free from the sticky mud. When they were nearly forty feet away from the other side of the mosquito-infested quagmire, Reisner saw something flutter on his right. His eyes had been fixed on the forest ahead, but this sudden movement came from under the water. The surface rippled like a tree had just been uprooted, followed by a huge alpha springing from the black depths at Porter. Algae and leeches clung to its ashen face, and it bared its teeth in a furious growl as it rushed forward. Reisner spun to his right, leveling his rifle, then felt something brush by his left leg. Another creature emerged from the swamp, slamming into his waist. He tumbled forward, losing his already precarious footing. The enraged beast grabbed his throat, but he slammed the butt of his AR into its head, smashing the orbital socket and sending splinters of bone into its right eye, which deflated. The alpha kept coming, both hands pawing at his face with its jagged fingernails. Reisner swung his AR around and fired two rounds into the skull, then watched the maniacal beast slide back into the sludge until it disappeared. He heard three rounds being fired from across the swamp and watched the alpha Porter had been fighting collapse into the water.

  Reisner moved towards Porter, looking at the parasites in the water. He grabbed Porter’s sleeve and yanked him back away from the disoriented worms that kept hovering near the splattered bodies of their former hosts.

  “Shit, let’s get out of here.” They frantically thrashed through the water towards the embankment, pushing through a tangle of willow saplings. He looked back at the others, who seemed like they were a mile away. This is a bad idea, getting segmented—but we can let this group of alphas slip away.

  Pacelle’s voice crackled into his earpiece, the message garbled from the water still dripping out of the headset. “Heat signature about…meters…near river.” He glanced over at Porter. “I remember there being a Grapevine River on the map. It was about a half-mile from the greenhouse.”

  Porter flared his eyebrows. “Well, let’s go then. Maybe we can still catch the afternoon ferry.”

  He followed the slurry of tracks through the sparsely treed pine forest, then noticed a single set of footprints veer off to the left. He stopped, pointing this development out to Porter then indicating that he should stay put and prepare to snipe anything that moved on the trail ahead of where Reisner was about to walk.

  Reisner pressed on, sixty feet later catching a blur of motion to his left, where an alpha was sprinting through the thick foliage. Two suppressed rounds followed from Porter, and the nearly headless body of the creature slid to a stop not far from Reisner. He saw the disgusting tangle of a large, ropy parasite slithering out from the base of the skull. Not wanting to waste any more ammo, Reisner picked up a large rock and slammed it down on the struggling worm. Whatever Selene thinks of the paras from a scientific perspective, these things are just disgusting on every level.

  Reisner and Porter could hear the gurgle of rapids to the right. Reisner trot-walked down the rest of the trail, scanning for more tracks, then stopped at the river’s edge.

  “There,” said Porter, thrusting his fingers out to the left.

  Reisner spotted two alphas emerging from the swift waters and rejoining the others, who stood fanned out like a tac-team in a cluster of
small pines.

  “There must be over two dozen of them,” whispered Porter. “They could have picked apart our entire team back at the greenhouse.”

  The last alpha to emerge from the water was moving slower than the large male who was offering out his hand. They were over three hundred yards away and out of range of his AR, but Reisner held up his scope and scanned the group. Reisner thought the body of the last one climbing out of the water was covered in mud but then realized it was charred, some of its blackened skin sloughing off and floating away in the river like woodchips.

  Reisner studied the larger creature, who appeared to walk more upright than the others and was dressed in black pants and a tan t-shirt. Is that Roland?

  He could hear Pacelle’s voice coming through again. This time the message was clear. “I’ve got a partial heat signature again, but it keeps fading—it’s three hundred and twenty meters past the opposite side of the river now.”

  “Eyes are on the prize,” said Reisner, studying the creatures through his scope and noticing how the burnt female had regained her composure and had pulled her shoulders back, as if trying to reassure the other one. The larger male was staring at her, and Reisner was sure they were communicating by their intense looks.

  “The lone heat signature is gone now,” said Pacelle.

  Reisner replied, his gaze never leaving the dominant alpha. “We’ve got our eyes on them, and I’m pretty sure it’s Roland.”

  He heard Dorr’s voice come over the speaker. “Are you one hundred percent certain?”

  Reisner gave Porter a quizzical glance while covering his mic with one hand. “How the hell is anyone supposed to be certain of that?” He removed his hand. “Not entirely, sir, but, regardless of whether he is in the group or not, we’ve not had a pack of alphas this large before. My team and I can be out of the area in mere minutes. If you can track them and drop a Hellfire missile—”