Cascade box set 2, p.61
Cascade Box Set 2, page 61
“Take the smaller roads,” said Clovis.
Abbey ignored him, instead keeping to weaving in and out between the warped metal blocks that were now rusting and falling apart.
“We ain’t gonna get through the—”
“I heard you the first—” She slammed on the breaks as an E.L.F standing two story’s high stood looking at them. Its head, dog like, was covered in scales and flowed into a more primate looking body. Its eyes shone line beacons, illuminated by the pickup’s headlights. It stood on two stout legs, its mouth partly open, revealing canine teeth a foot long.
“I’m not sensing it, why am I not—”
Before Abbey could finish the creature charged forward knocking a green sedan and a white pickup to the side. They crashed up against the slim walls which lined the road.
She threw the pickup into reverse and slammed down on the pedal, causing the wheels to spin until they gripped and they surged backwards, smashing through vehicles.
“Its gaining!” shouted Clovis. He briefly closed his eyes, lost momentarily in concentration. “Why ain’t this critter stopping!”
With each new impact the pickup lost speed, and the E.L.F bounding towards them got closer.
An almighty crunch stopped them in an instant and sent them lunging forwards, their seatbelts just stopping them short of the windscreen.
Abbey shook her head on landing back in her seat and looked at her side mirror. “We’ve crashed into a semi!” She flicked the gearstick back into drive, pulling the steering wheel to the right and hit the gas, but the pickup resolutely refused to move. “We’re stuck!”
They both scrambled to pull their seatbelts off as the creature disposed of a final vehicle between them and itself, and with a roar leaped forward into the air. Abbey flung her door open, grabbing her backpack with one hand and her Glock with the other and dived to the side. Before she had even hit the ground, the sound of metal crumpling, clashed with the shattering of glass and the ground around her shook.
Not bothering to look back, she clambered over the wall in front of her, and immediately fell, not knowing in the dark when she would hit the ground. She soon did and began rolling down a steep embankment. As the earth and sky changed place she sensed Mo nearby, and managed to send him the emotion needed to stay away from the huge creature that just attacked them.
Finally she came to a stop against something solid, but in the dark she had no idea what it was. With her head still swimming, she looked back up to the only point of light for miles, the single remaining headlight of Burt’s pickup. The huge creature was still slicing angrily at his vehicle, bits of it being torn off and then thrown into the night sky.
Not coming after me.
She slowly got to her feet with no idea of what was around her, and felt her wrist which was aching.
As the E.L.F continued its attack on its metal enemy, she realized the ground she was on was solid. She had a flashlight in her backpack, but with an eighteen foot mound of death just tens of yards away from her she wasn’t about to turn it on. She felt behind, her hand touching something cold.
Metal fence or guardrail? Maybe I’m on a side road.
As her eyes begun to adjust, she noticed a large monolithic building a few hundred feet away and started jogging towards it.
*****
It had only been a few hours since Sam returned with Isaiah and another injured justice force member, and Zach was already deep into R.E.M sleep when a loud knock shook the door of his small but well laid out room. “Yup, I’m awake, what?” He half shouted.
The door opened a small amount and a young soldier’s face appeared in the gap. “Sir, sorry to wake you, but we have Mr. Crenshaw on comms in main operations, he wants to talk to you, he says it’s urgent.”
“I’ll be there.”
The soldier left, closing the door gently.
Zach went to lift his head, then regretted it as the painkillers he had taken some hours before were wearing off. Waiting for a lull between throbs, he sat up and looked back at his pillow. A small dark patch of blood had formed from the bump on his head. He reached up tentatively feeling the small egg shaped lump, then grimaced on how sore it still felt.
He sat for a moment thinking of Abbey, and what she must be having to contend with all the way across the country.
Monsters, now aliens. What’s next? Zombies?
He allowed himself a brief smile then got dressed.
Soon he was back amongst the bustle of the bunkers main operations room. It was half the size of the one in the cave network, but still impressive, especially considering a few weeks earlier it didn’t exist.
The soldier from before saw him enter and pointed to a headset lying on a nearby desk.
Zach placed it carefully on his head. “What can I do for you Brad? Over.”
“It’s Abbey, Zach. Over.”
The pain in Zach’s head intensified as did his heart rate. “What about her? Is she okay? Over.”
“As far as I know she’s fine, but she has gone Zach. There was an explosion of some kind in one of the rooms in the bunker network, a number of people were injured. Mitchell is saying it was Abbey’s doing. Over.”
“What?” It was an instinctual response and one that left his mouth before what Brad had said fully settled in his mind.
“Yeah it makes no sense to me either. There’s something else… It appears she might have left with Clovis. Over.”
Zach started to feel dizzy, the room swaying in sync with the pounding at the top of his skull.
“You there Zach? Over.”
“I’m here—” He looked at the nearby soldier. “Hey, I need some painkillers and some water.” The solider nodded and quickly left. “—Sorry, yeah. I find that hard to believe… Unless she was kidnaped? Over.”
“That’s what I said to Mitchell, but she says people saw them leaving separately. She left, right after the explosion, and he left shortly before. Over.”
A strange notion starting to form in Zach’s mind.
Could the bomb have been an attempt to kill Erin?
“Is Erin alive? Over.”
“Yeah, Mitchell was pretty pissed that he was injured. But there’s more bad news. Mitchell is sending a squad of her people including Cascaders after them. Over.”
“What?”
The soldier appeared with the tablets and a plastic cup with water in it.
“Mitchell say’s Abbey’s a threat to all Cascaders everywhere, and she must be stopped. Over.”
“What about the toxin? We need it down here!” He tried to stop his emotion from being obvious.
“There was no mention of that.”
Zach swore under his breath. “Can you patch me through to the general? Over.”
“She has cut all communication. I tried getting her back on the radio, but there’s no response from up there. What do you want us to do? Over.”
Zach snatched the pills and water from the soldier and swallowed them, then handed the cup back to him.
The pain coursing through his head was stopping most thoughts from forming. He sat heavily on the desk and took a deep breath.
“Zach?”
“I need to talk to Trow and think this through. Abbey’s probably on her way to you, but I’ll get back to you. Over.”
Brad acknowledged, but Zach was already straining his mind to understand what could have happened.
I can’t help her now. I need to help the people in the camp. We need that toxin.
He took another breath trying to calm his heart and head, trying to think of any way of out the mess they were in, but each time he did his mind returned to Abbey.
She’s out there again. Out there with him.
One of the side doors opened and Fiona walked over to him.
“There’s news from Brad?”
Zach looked up. “Yeah. Things just got a whole lot more complicated.”
CHAPTER SIX
Mounds of rubble just visible through the thick dust loomed above Abbey as she walked the silent streets of the camp. Blocks of steel and cement, each one large enough to crush a car, sat at awkward angles threatening to collapse even further.
Where is everyone?
One of the shapes was out of place. Running forward, across the street, she saw it wasn’t a part of a building, but instead a clawed hoof, as big as she was tall, but completely opaque due to the thick layers of dust it was covered in.
I’m too late.
She felt them before her other five senses told her she was not alone. Turning around to look along the street, she shuddered. Purple lights, hundreds, each a vague humanoid form, but giant in size. The Hulathen.
No… I need to find Zach, he will be here, in a bunker. I need to…
Abbey abruptly opened her eyes from her dream. A faint glow that heralded the sun had already moved above the horizon, lit the floor in front of her. She had managed to find a back entrance via a loading dock, to a huge superstore, and then snuck into the first vaguely comfortable looking room she could find, an employee’s common room.
Plant shaped blurs swayed through frosted glass windows. She went to reach into her bag for her water when she realized in front of her was a fully stocked vending machine, complete with bottles of water, candy bars and some sandwiches which had become something else.
She then felt a presence to her left. Clovis was sitting on one of three chairs which surrounded a small round table. She quickly reached down to the floor, from the sofa she was on.
“You looking for this?” He held up her Glock, with his finger on the trigger.
She froze.
He sneered. “Never liked the fancy guns.” He placed it on the table.
“How you find me?” She was too angry with herself to allow the fear in her throat to affect her speech.
“I’m like you remember. I know where our kind are.” He got up suddenly, grabbed a chair, walked to the vending machine, and with one swipe smashed the glass with the metal legs.
Abbey saw the distance between him and the gun and sprang up, lunged then grabbed the weapon for herself, pointing it towards his back.
He leaned into the machine and pulled out two bottles. “I did think about killing you. As you slept. Really thought about it.” He sighed then without turning around twisted the top off one of the bottles and gulped half of its contents down.
Abbey’s hand wavered on the gun.
“If you’re going to kill me, best you do it. Otherwise we need to find a new truck.”
“They’re isn’t any ‘we’.” She said still pointing the weapon at his back.
He reached through the splinted pieces of glass once more and pulled down a handful of chocolate bars, then walked over the broken shards towards the door. “Me and Tiger will be outside when you’re ready.” He left.
For a second Abbey remained pointing the gun at the door, and then let out a breath and let her hand drop to the side. Her eyes then grew wide and she quickly turned and rummaged under one of the sofa cushions. Finding the white box that Raj gave her. She relaxed slightly.
She walked to the broken machine with her pack, and held it open inside, pulling down what bottles and food she could, until she knew the weight would be too much to carry.
She looked at the window, specifically at the latch which held it shut. Shaking her head she turned and walked to the door, opening it then leaving.
The small corridor which she only got an impression of some hours before, had a number of posters hanging from the walls, and a billboard detailing the weeks ‘employee events’. She kept looking behind herself expecting Clovis to suddenly be there. He was nearby, she could feel it.
Opening the door at the end of the confined space, revealed cathedral high ceilings just visible in the gloom and a scene of opulence. Shelves and racks a hundred feet high, spanned out in front of her, each full of produce and products of some kind.
Mindful of the presence of Clovis, she switched on her flashlight and walked along the aisles in awe of what was on offer. She felt as if she was having one of those dreams where you are surrounded by the things you want the most, and then realize you can’t take them with you when you wake.
Arriving at a shelf that held particularly attractive items, she shoveled out the candy bars that were filling her backpack, opened one and starting chewing on it. She then walked along the aisle placing cans of soup, tinned pies, tinned fruit and any other thing nutritious she could carry. When the weight of her pack got to the point where it was going to slow her down, she stopped.
She whipped around. Clovis was leaning on one of the steel posts which reached fifty feet up towards the ceiling. He had an axe hanging down from his hand which he was gently swaying back and forth.
“Man could live like a king here,” he said.
She turned away from him, reexamining the rest of the shelves, and to give him the impression she wasn’t afraid of him. “Then stay, be a king.”
“Nah. To be a king you need people to rule. And—” He looked around. “—I ain’t seeing many of them around here.”
Abbey went to reply when a sensation hit her, like a swarm of bees had suddenly invaded her body and flowed from her toes to the top of her head. She slowly turned back to Clovis, he had stopped swinging the axe.
“They’re coming,” he growled.
“Did you find a truck?”
He walked forward, throwing her a set of keys. “Yeah. It’s out front.”
They both ran towards the front of the store. Abbey glanced at the goods flashing by. She almost didn’t want to leave.
The closer they got to the large glass windows of the entrance, the lighter it got around them, and the greater the feeling that the other Cascaders weren’t far off. They both bundled through the already open door, and out into the cold morning air.
Abbey looked up into the clear sky, and quickly caught sight of a cross shape shadow high above gliding effortlessly. Knowing her friend and pet was up there took some of the fear from her, but again she was being chased and it was a feeling she thought she had left in the past.
As she got into the driver’s seat of the relatively new looking dark gray pickup, an idea jumped into her head.
What if I shoot him? Not dead, but wound him. Then the others would find him, and I would be able to get further away.
It was a sound plan, and as he got into the driver’s seat throwing the axe onto the back seat, she pulled the Glock from a pocket in her backpack and held it ready to fire into his thigh. As soon as he sat, she pulled the trigger. A dull click came from her gun.
Clovis continued looking forward. “To kill a man with a gun, you need bullets. Good thing I picked up some more boxes of them—” He slowly turned to her. “—Now we going to sit here and wait for Erin and his people to catch us, or we getting back on the road?”
Stupid. I should have checked the magazine.
She sat frozen for a moment then turned the keys in the ignition and the pickup pulled away.
*****
As the pickup passed over the Connecticut river and through Hartford the feeling that they were being followed began to fade. Abbey kept her hand on the Glock even though as a projectile weapon it was useless to her. Maybe if he attacked her she could hit him with it.
She had spent the first few minutes after leaving the parking lot of the superstore chastising herself for not knowing the obvious, that Clovis was not going to let her have a loaded gun. Once she had gotten that misgiving out of the way, she concentrated on just what the hell she was going to do next. She was traveling with a man that had tried to kill her numerous times, being chased by a group of super-powered humans that thought she tried to blow them up. Who knows what they would do if they caught up with her. She was sure Erin was with them and his was a face she never wanted to see again.
“I’ve been thinking about why we couldn’t sense the giant critter last night,” said Clovis. His statement pulled her out of her own head.
“Okay…”
“Maybe those things from space, took most of the critters that were easy to find. So—”
“What’s left is what they or we find hard to find…” It was a plausible explanation and one that left her somewhat confused as to how stupid she thought the man next to her was. The phrase ‘street smarts’ flashed through her mind.
“Yeah.”
“That means there could be more E.L.F’s out here, and we won’t know they are there until we run into them.”
“Yup.”
Great.
The towns of Waterbury and Danbury came and went, and they kept to highway eighty-four moving in a south-westerly direction and passing into New York state. Soon after they passed over another of the great rivers, the Hudson. They both sensed some creatures in the watery depths, which was accompanied with a splash or two upsetting the calm waters.
Least there are still some normal E.L.F’s out there.
As they approached Harrisburg the sun was at its zenith, and both front windows of the pickup were open to allow the cool spring air to blow through the cabin.
More vehicles started to block the highway and Abbey weaved the pickup through them, her mind caught between her actions, and a hundred other things, all screaming for attention.
A clattering sound echoed off the dry road surface. At first she wasn’t sure she was hearing it right, so she slowed leaning out of the driver’s window slightly.
“I hear it too,” said Clovis.
The repetitive noise was getting louder and she knew what it was. Her eyes darted around looking for a turn off, but there were only steep grassy banks and walls on both sides. “We need to get off the highway.”
Clovis turned around trying to see out of the rear window. “What you reckon it is?”
“It’s a helicopter. Erin’s sending humans after us, so we can’t detect them coming.”
Clever.
She pushed the gas pedal down, increasing their speed, but the vehicles lying scattered all around made any linear movement hazardous.
“I see it,” said Clovis. “It’s still a few miles off, but coming this way.”
