Allegiance

TWENTY-SIX

“Vargas is going to see his whore in an hour,” Rhino said. “Mac says his advance team of Praetorian Guards is already at the rig.”

X stared at the radio equipment in the command center, his hands shaking. The news of their good luck with Vargas did nothing to lighten the weight of the news he had just heard from Captain Mitchells.

“King Xavier, this is our chance,” Rhino said. “Mac and Felipe are in the port, waiting for us in a boat.”

“Better come inside,” Sloan said.

“What’s going on?” Rhino asked.

She shut the door behind him. “We just got a message from Discovery,” she said.

“Shit. It’s bad, isn’t it?”

X got up from the chair facing the bank of radio equipment. He looked down at Miles, who looked back at him with eyes clouded by cataracts. The dog’s tail thumped against the floor, anticipating a belly rub or perhaps a treat. He had no idea what had happened, but his tail went still.

“It’s okay, buddy,” X said. He gave the dog a piece of fish jerky and leaned down to look at the maps of Rio de Janeiro, the Iron Reef outpost in Belize, and Outrider, the colony the Cazadores had abandoned thirty years ago—the place where Horn had apparently spent the past few years preparing to retake his throne.

“King Xavier, what’s happened?” Rhino asked, his voice tense with worry.

“The mission has failed,” X said. “We’ve lost half the divers.”

“Sofia,” Rhino said, stepping closer.

X could see the dread in his general’s face. “She’s still alive,” he said.

“Thank the Octopus Gods.”

“Don’t thank them yet,” Sloan said.

“The Cazadores are dead,” X said. “All of them, as far as we know. Killed by Horn and his skinwalkers.”

“Horn?” Rhino took a shaky breath and let it out. “The skinwalkers are there?”

X nodded. “Captain Mitchells saw them on the drone footage.”

“General Santiago…”

“Dead.”

Something seemed to shift in Rhino. “Then there is no time to waste,” he said. “We must strike Vargas today.”

“Hold up, big guy,” Sloan said. “I want to know how Horn knew about our mission.”

X looked to the radio equipment. “He must have been listening to our transmissions. First to the fuel outpost, then to the bunker.”

“But they were encrypted,” Sloan said.

X slapped himself on the forehead. “Yes, but the response from the bunker wasn’t. And to have known about the fuel outpost, he must be tapped into the Cazador channels.”

“Horn and his demon men,” Rhino said. “Traitorous filth.”

“Could they be working with the Black Order?” X asked.

Rhino pulled on his nose ring. “Possibly, but—”

“I doubt Vargas or anyone else in the Black Order has cracked our encrypted channel with Discovery,” said Sloan, “but if they have, they’ll know soon what happened. You were both right. We must act now.”

X walked over to the locker and took off his white T-shirt, trading it for a brown robe that went over his shorts. Then he grabbed his duty belt of weapons and finally his sword.

Sloan said, “If Colonel Vargas and his pals don’t know yet what’s happened out there, they will when the airship returns without any Cazadores aboard.”

“There isn’t a single Cazador survivor?” Rhino asked.

“No, but that could actually help us after we kill Vargas,” X said. “I’ll have video footage to prove to the Black Order that the skinwalkers, not us, killed General Santiago.”

X finished securing his gear and weapons.

“Maybe you should let us handle this, King Xavier,” Rhino said.

“Big guy’s right,” Sloan said. “You shouldn’t be seen.”

X flipped the hood over his freshly buzzed head. “I won’t be seen,” he said. “Just look after Miles while I’m gone, Lieutenant. Okay?”

She muttered a curse. “You’re never going to listen to me, are you?”

X grinned. “Probably not.” He pointed at the radio. “If Captain Mitchells sends another transmission, be careful what you say, just in case our enemies are listening.”

“Understood, sir.”

X patted Miles on the head. “I’ll be back soon, buddy.”

Rhino opened the door, and they stepped out into the sunshine. A short walk brought them into a stairwell they took down to the boat port. A fishing boat waited in the shadows near the back of the moorings, past the fancy boats.

Mac sat behind the wheel. In the seat beside him, Felipe honed a blade. Both men wore hooded anoraks with long sleeves. Rhino put his on as soon as he got in the boat.

“Isaiah moored the Angry Tuna there this morning,” Mac said. “He’s already in position.”

X took a seat between Rhino and Felipe as Mac fired up the engine. He was surrounded by Cazador warriors heading out to kill more Cazador warriors. It seemed crazy that keeping humanity alive required so much killing.

There was a reason the world had ended, and this was it, X thought to himself. The machines may have helped speed up the process, but basic human greed had all but doomed his species. He had never understood this simple truth before now.

X gripped the sword that Katrina had used in battle against the Cazadores. She had given her life to save their people, and Michael and Les were out there doing what they had to do. Now it was his turn. If it meant slicing open Vargas’s throat, so be it. He probably should have done that on day one.

The boat sped away from the capitol rig in warm sunlight. X kept his hood pulled up to hide his face from curious eyes. He didn’t look over his shoulder, afraid that if he did, he would change his mind about this crazy scheme.

“Listen up,” Mac said. “This plan is simple, but we all have a role.”

Felipe tilted his head, and Rhino translated.

“Once we get to the rig, we enter through a ladder on the eastern side,” Mac said. “From there, we go through the inside of the rig, avoiding all the open trading areas.”

The boat hit a wave at an angle and slewed a little sideways. Mac straightened out and backed the throttle off a notch. “The brothel Vargas visits is just off an open area, and there are two floors above it that give a clear view of the front entrance.”

“That’s where Isaiah is going to be?” Rhino asked.

“Yes. He’ll take out the front guards with his bow while we enter through the back. There will be at least two more guards there, maybe three, that we have to kill before we get to Vargas, who should be busy when we arrive.”

“You’re sure he isn’t a thirty-second kind of guy?” X asked. “He always seemed like one. I ask because that gives us a very small window.”

Mac laughed. “The shop owner is a friend of mine. She said Vargas typically goes for the full treatment, including a long massage.”

“And the girl?” X asked. “Is she in on this?”

“No, but I’ll make sure she gets a really good tip and doesn’t say a word.”

X didn’t like that she would see their faces, but that was the least of his worries right now. The Praetorian Guards were all skilled in close-quarters fighting. They had to surprise these guys and kill them fast. Sure, he could go in blasting with his new weapon slung over his robe, but there were too many civilians in the area for a shoot-out. This would require precision and sharp swords.

“We do this clean,” X said. “Clean and fast.”

Rhino explained the rest of the plan to Felipe. The young man grinned and went back to honing an already razor-edged small knife with a curving blade. An identical blade was sheathed on his belt.

“Heads up,” Mac said. “Almost there.”

The trading-post rig appeared small on the horizon, but even at this reduced speed they would be there in minutes. X used the time to rehearse everything in his mind.

He prayed that Michael, Magnolia, Rodger, and Sofia made it back to the airship safely, but the horrific losses filled him with a deep dread. Looking out at the horizon, he also wondered where Ada was.

X would never admit this to Rhino, but when he went to visit her, he had actually gone there to kill her. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it, so instead, he had helped her escape.

“Come back in five years,” he had said, “and I will welcome you back to the islands.”

It was half the time he had spent alone on the surface, and if she survived as he had, then he would forgive her for her sins.

The map he had given Ada was to the place in Florida where he had lived several years. If she could get there, she would have access to the resources that had kept him alive until the sky people landed and rescued him.

But he doubted she would make it that far. In a way, X had effectively killed her by sending her out there.

“Here we go,” Mac said. Felipe hopped up on the bow and eased the craft into a mooring between two tethered boats.

Notes from a guitar and several wind instruments drifted away from the trading post. The tone was calming, beautiful even.

This was it. Time to fight again. And as always, he would rise to the occasion, ready to fight for humanity even if it meant losing more of his own.

The vines had burrowed deep inside the earth, forming tunnels wide enough for a person to navigate. Michael and Sofia had scrambled into one of them but now had to crawl as it narrowed.

After an hour, they finally came to a chamber that let them get off their bellies. Michael managed to get into a crouch, and Sofia came up on her armored kneepads.

“We’re lost,” she said.

“I know that.”

Sofia twisted and stretched her torso. “Now that we can turn around, maybe we should get back topside,” she said. “Edgar and Arlo are gone. You have to accept that, Commander.”

“I have, but I haven’t given up on finding the people who took them.”

“Why? What’s the point? Are you going to kill them? Kill the people we came to save?”

Michael wasn’t sure what he was going to do. He just knew he wanted to find the survivors, even if they turned out to be Edgar and Arlo’s killers.

He looked at his wrist computer, checking to make sure Rodger and Magnolia were still alive. Both their beacons came online. They appeared close. In fact, they seemed to be somewhere right above him and Sofia.

“How is that possible?” Michael whispered. He considered using the comm channel, but he didn’t know who might be out there listening.

Sofia wiped grime and sap off her visor and said, “Commander, my battery’s at forty percent and I’m almost out of water. I could use something to eat, too.”

Michael checked the data on his subscreen. The radiation and air toxicity were surprisingly much lower underground than above and kept getting better the deeper they descended.

He pulled a sealed energy bar from his vest pocket. “You should be okay to open your visor for a minute or two,” he said. “Go ahead. I’m going to eat something, too.”

Over their chewing, they began to hear the faint sound of voices echoing in the passage.

“Do you hear that?” Sofia said.

Michael nodded and shut off his helmet light. She did the same. Darkness swallowed the divers, but it wasn’t the pitch black that scared him—it was the voices.

“Can you make out what they’re saying?” Michael asked.

“Sounds like Spanish, but I can’t make it out.”

“I thought the people we came here to save spoke Portuguese.”

“Maybe not all of them,” she said. “And Portuguese sounds a lot like Spanish, only softer.”

“Turn on your NVGs and follow me. I want to check it out.”

Michael crawled out of the chamber into the narrowing tunnel, moving on his knees and hands. It wasn’t long before he saw the pulsing red light of vines winking in the passage. The glow seemed to be coming from a hole in the rocky wall. Several branches from a vine had broken through, curling inside the tunnel.

He pried back the mat of vines to look into a large cavern. No, a huge cavern.

Roots and stems stretched away from the floor and extended into dozens of tunnels in the walls above. All the roots seemed to connect to a bulb the size of a small house on the cavern floor. Helmet-sized barbs covered the mass like huge, spiky warts.

“It’s the heart,” he whispered.

“Heart?” Sofia said.

He got out of the way so she could take a look.

Sofia looked down and then jerked back into the shadows as more voices echoed.

Michael moved over and pulled back the vines again.

Sure enough, to the right of the heart were two naked men, walking with arrows nocked on their bowstrings. He strained for a better look at what appeared to be a steel door in the cavern wall.

“Holy shit,” Michael whispered. “I think this is the back way to the bunker.”

Sofia didn’t say anything, which told him she wasn’t keen on the idea of going down there to check it out.

“This is what we came here for,” he said. “Why our friends died. We have to check it out.”

He thought of Layla and Bray and everyone else back on the airship and the islands. They weren’t the only ones who had spent their lives in the darkness before finding the light. He didn’t know whether the people down there were good or bad, but he had to find out more. For all he knew, the defectors had killed them and his divers. If that was what happened, then his people were likely responsible for the transmission that led the machines here.

“We have to finish what Team Raptor came here for,” Michael said.

A whimpering sound came over the voices in the chamber. Michael checked again but couldn’t see the source.

“Come on,” he whispered.

Sofia hesitated, then followed him down the sloping tunnel. They were descending at a thirty-five-degree angle now, and they had to be careful not to slide along the steep, rocky floor.

As they descended, the whimpering began to sound more like sobbing.

He counted at least three, maybe four, voices over the noise. Another opening in the tunnel wall provided a view inside the chamber.

He turned so he faced up, toward Sofia, who had stopped on her knees. The window into the chamber revealed even more naked men with bows, and they weren’t alone.

Two more men, both in black clothing, hung from ropes around their ankles. Blood dripped from their hair onto the floor.

Michael pulled back into the shadows and let Sofia scoot down for a view.

“Edgar and Arlo,” she whispered.

It made sense now. Their beacons had switched off when these wrinkly men removed their armor.

Michael took another look. Even from a distance, it was obvious the divers were in bad shape. Beaten and possibly cut or stabbed, judging from the sheer amount of blood on their jumpsuits and flesh. Neither appeared to be conscious. The sobs were coming from someone else.

He moved again to check the door to the bunker and saw another group of people huddled together against the wall right below him and Sofia.

The plastic filtration masks they wore hid their faces, but he could tell that most of them were emaciated. He also spotted kids in the group. The entire lot wore gray outfits: jumpsuits, pants, and shirts with a logo of some sort.

The people from the bunker.

But who the hell were the six naked freaks who had taken his divers captive?

Michael thought back to the skin flags he had seen aboveground. He had seen something similar at the fuel outpost, but they also looked like what the defectors left behind in Jamaica.

If the machines weren’t here, then it could only be…

“Skinwalkers,” he whispered.

These naked men had to be part of Horn’s group.

Michael crouched and brought up his laser rifle, zooming in on the biggest of the guards. The guy was a brute, easily Rhino’s size. He held a long needlelike blade and walked around Arlo and Edgar, studying them the way a scientist might look at a caged animal.

Zeroing in on his face, Michael saw what looked like stitches in the wrinkled brown flesh, all the way around the chin and skull. It wasn’t just his face. His entire body was covered in the stitched-on skin—even his damn boots.

Before Michael could react, the man jammed the needle blade into Arlo’s side, but Arlo hardly made a sound.

“No!” Michael blurted in a voice just shy of a shout. His voice echoed, turning several heads among the skinwalkers.

He sank back into the shadows, heart thumping against his ribs.

Sofia, still on her knees, brought up her rifle and trained it on the opening in the wall. They waited several moments, but the arrows and excited shouts never came.

He moved slightly for a look farther down the sloping tunnel. It had to come out somewhere, and he had a feeling it wasn’t far.

“We have to do something,” Sofia said.

Michael was glad they were on the same page. He raised his rifle and said, “Let’s kill these demonic fucks.”

She nodded. “Just tell me when to fire, Comm—”

More voices cut her off. These were louder and seemed to come from new people entering the cavern. He sneaked a glance. The six men had turned into twenty, maybe more. Some were wounded, limping along or clutching wounds in their torsos. Others had armor showing through charred, wrinkled skin.

A man with a horn on his helmet strode into the cavern, carrying two axes. Walking past the heart, he raised one of his blades at Arlo and Edgar. The brute with the stiletto reached up and sliced through the ropes around their ankles, dropping them to the ground.

Michael counted another dozen soldiers flooding into the cavern behind the leader with the axes.

“Siren shit,” he whispered.

The man with the horn spoke rapidly in a muffled voice. Burned skin hung loosely off his helmet. He wiped a shred away from his eyes.

“What’s he saying?” Michael asked.

“He says to kill the rest of these people and skin them, then head back to their boat. It’s time…” Sofia’s words trailed off.

“Time for what?”

“To go to the Metal Islands and take the throne from el Pulpo,” Sofia said. “He must not know that X is king.”

“We have to stop him,” Michael said.

“But so many…”

“I know, but we have guns and they don’t,” Michael said. “You stay and shoot from here. I’ll head down and fire from the floor, okay?”

She hesitated, then nodded.

“Thanks for sticking with me,” Michael said. “Good luck.”

“Good luck.”

He squirmed around and moved back down the tunnel. As he suspected, there was another opening in the wall, this one much bigger than the others.

A skinwalker stood on the other side, facing the group of people from the bunker. Michael pulled the knife from his sheath and jammed it through the back of the man’s neck, up into the brain.

He slumped over, and Michael raised his laser rifle, choosing his first target, the big bastard who had stabbed Arlo. He now had an axe in hand and was preparing to bring it down on Arlo’s neck.

Lining up the sights, Michael whispered, “Hello and goodbye, asshole.”

The brilliant line of blue light flashed through the man’s helmet and into the rock wall. He dropped with a thud onto the ground between Arlo and Edgar.

Michael roved to the next target, who was nocking an arrow on his bowstring. The laser ripped through his neck. The next bolt sizzled into another helmet.

In just over ten seconds, Michael had killed four men, but the others quickly homed in on his position. Arrows flew, and gunshots rang out from Sofia’s position.

More gunfire joined the echoing din. Michael cursed their luck. These fuckers had guns too, and that changed the calculus. He expected rounds to start pinging off the wall over his head, but none came.

Not only gunfire but also laser bolts were coming from the other side of the chamber.

Oh, hell yes!

Magnolia and Rodger must have been stalking this second group. That explained why some of them were injured. But where was the rest of their team?

He helped them by laying down covering fire.

The skinwalkers fanned out, launching arrows in all directions. The people from the bunker tried to wriggle away, but they were all bound with rope.

Michael slid down into the chamber and started to cut their bonds. He freed a man and handed him a knife, motioning to cut the others free. The guy understood and went to work.

Another prisoner had already broken out of his restraints somehow and ran with outstretched hands at a skinwalker. The soldier turned and loosed an arrow into the guy’s gray suit.

Michael took the shooter down with a laser bolt that cut his bow in half and flashed through his chest. Then he looked for the leader with the unicorn helmet. He was making his way toward Arlo and Edgar, both axes in hand.

“No, you don’t,” Michael said, firing a bolt that sent one of the axes spinning away.

Screams echoed through the chamber as two skinwalkers ran at Michael with swords drawn. He cut them down with laser bolts; then his gun overheated again.

Michael drew the pistol X had given him and aimed for the leader, but by the time he spotted the man again, his men were trying to pull him away. A third joined in, grabbing him while Michael fired several bullets.

The group of skinwalkers fell in behind them, shooting arrows and guns to cover their leader’s retreat. Michael got down to avoid the fire. He squeezed off more shots, thinning out the rear guard, but they whisked the leader away into a side tunnel.

Across the chamber, another ally had joined Magnolia and Rodger. The tall figure fired an assault rifle, picking off stragglers.

Michael got up and ran over to Arlo and Edgar, changing the magazine of his pistol along the way. When he got to them, Edgar was unconscious, but Arlo was awake. He drooled blood and looked up, his perfect smile ruined by several missing teeth.

“You came back,” he mumbled.

Michael ripped into his med pack and began pulling out dressings to stop the bleeding from Arlo’s side.

“You’re going to be fine, man. Just hang on.”

“I’m sorry,” Arlo said with quivering blue lips. “I screwed up.”

“You screwed up only if you die.” Michael pushed gauze against the wound and taped off the sides. “Just breathe, okay?”

Arlo nodded. “Sir…”

“Don’t talk.”

“But, sir… I really wanted a new nickname.”

“If you live, I’ll give you one,” Michael said.

Sofia ran over to help Arlo and Edgar, giving Michael an opportunity to call in support. He bumped on his comms for the first time on the mission.

“Captain Mitchells, this is Raptor One,” he said. “We need evac as soon as possible. We have multiple wounded, and…” He looked at the survivors on the ground behind him. “… at least thirty people who need transport, over. Maybe a few more.”

“I’m already here,” said a voice.

Michael looked across the chamber, past the glowing floral “heart.” The tall figure he had seen earlier was wearing Hell Diver armor.

“Captain,” Michael said. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

Magnolia and Rodger ran over.

“The airship is topside,” Les said. “We have to get everyone out of here fast, before the monsters come back.”

Michael wasn’t sure which monsters he was talking about this time: human or mutant.

He looked back at the bunker survivors, huddled in their gray jumpsuits and staring at the Hell Divers as if they were gods, like the statue they had passed on the dive in.

To a society that had known only demons, perhaps they were.