Extinction Age

-22-

Beckham used the glow from strategically placed ceiling lights as he followed Horn into the complex. A breeze coming from vents on both sides of the tunnel brushed against Charlie team as they moved. The air was cold and stank of mildew, but it meant the ventilation system was still working. Beckham was no longer worried about suffocating or not being able to see—he was worried about what they would find as they got deeper into the complex.

Beckham sidestepped around a puddle and saw a sign that read Ventilation Control Room with an arrow pointing to a tunnel on their left. He could just see the last of Valentine’s men disappear down that passage and hear the distant tromp of their boots on the concrete.

“Which way?” Horn asked.

Beckham flashed a hand signal to the south. They continued past the tunnel Valentine had taken, passing doors on both sides of the narrow corridor. He noted the marks of tire treads and scrapes along the walls, as though vehicles had squeezed through side by side. His heart hammered as they moved deeper into the mountain, part of him expecting to see Variants come clambering across the walls. There was no question they were inside the complex—but where?

“We’re going to carry those drugs all this way?” Horn whispered.

“Was hoping we’d find a vehicle inside after we cleared the complex,” Beckham replied. He hustled to catch up with Horn. Another sign and arrow indicated they were close to the domestic reservoir. The FEMA warehouse wouldn’t be far.

A draft of rotting fruit hit Beckham’s nostrils halfway down the corridor. He halted and balled his hand into a fist. There were two more doors along the wall up ahead, and one of them was open a few inches.

Pointing first at his eyes, Beckham then pointed to Chow and then to the open door. Beckham made his way over to the wall in a half crouch. The stench was coming from inside the room. He waited several seconds, listening for anything moving inside.

“You take high. I’m low,” Beckham said. “Sweep right to left. I’ll go left to right.”

Chow nodded and stepped forward, putting his foot against the rusted bottom of the open door.

“Execute,” Beckham said.

Chow pushed the door open with his left hand and burst inside. Beckham followed close behind, arching his M4 across what looked like a mechanical room. Dozens of boxy machines, each six feet tall, were situated throughout the space, blocking Beckham’s view and dividing the area into a maze.

Beckham gritted his teeth and sidestepped around the nearest machine with his rifle trained down the first aisle. Chow started down the right side and disappeared from Beckham’s peripheral vision.

The left side was clear, but as Beckham continued, the potent smell increased. He halted when he saw four mangled corpses at the end of the room. Bones glistening with blood protruded from the sacks of flesh.

“Found something,” Beckham whispered over the comm. He felt a presence to his right a moment later. Chow stood there with a sleeve over his nose, his gaze locked on the twisted corpses.

“Better check it out,” Beckham said. He pulled his shemagh over his face and then led with his rifle. The bodies were so badly disfigured it took Beckham a moment to realize they weren’t human.

Chow swiped a sweaty strand of black hair from his face, shook his head and whispered, “If the Variants are eating each other…”

“Then they must have already eaten their way through any survivors,” Beckham replied.

Their comms flared as they retreated from the room. Valentine’s voice surged over the channel. “Charlie 1, Bravo 1, eyes on the objective. It’s in a tunnel just to the left of the reservoir. You better get over here. Place is fucking huge.”

Beckham pulled the scarf down and looked away from the gore. “Copy that, Bravo 1,” Beckham said. “We’ll be right there.”

Kennor snatched the picture of his grandkids off his desk and stuffed it into his pack.

“Hurry, sir!” Harris said, his voice just shy of a shout.

Wood was already gone. He had taken off with several of his men a few minutes prior, and they were on their way to the tarmac.

I’m too old for this shit, Kennor thought as he followed Harris into the command center. The room was packed with his staff. Most of them shouted into headsets as they stared at the wall-mounted monitors, where a security feed played in real-time on the screens.

“My God,” Kennor said. He gripped his bag tighter when he saw what they were watching. The display on the left showed a battle inside one of the hallways. A trio of Marines fired at a pack of Variants flooding the tunnel. Fire erupted from their rifles as they emptied their magazines into the mass.

Several of the monsters flopped to the floor, but the meat of the pack surged forward, consuming the Marines. A female Variant with wispy hair dangling over her forehead took to the walls. She dashed over the concrete on all fours. Her naked flesh came into focus as she skittered closer, like a subject under a microscope. The bulging veins crisscrossing her skin seemed to pulsate under the banks of LEDs. She slowed as she approached the camera, tilting her head and narrowing her yellow eyes at the lens. Her lips opened into a black void and she released a roar that only the dying Marines in the tunnel would hear before she trampled the wall-mounted camera. The feed went black, and Kennor let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding in.

“How the fuck did they get in!” he shouted.

“Through the ventilation tunnels,” Harris said.

“Can we hold them?”

“I don’t know,” Harris said. His voice was shaky. “Sir, we have to go. Now.”

Kennor glared at the colonel. Harris’s features were pinched by fear. After all these years, he had never realized how weak Harris really was. The colonel wanted to run from the Variants, but Kennor had already retreated once. He’d left the cities, but there was no way in hell he would abandon Central Command. He wouldn’t let it fall to the monsters, not without a fight.

“I’m staying,” Kennor said. He dropped his bag on a chair and pulled his M1911 from the holster on his hip. The gun had been in his family since WWII. His father had carried it from France to Germany. It had killed Nazis, and now it was going to kill Variants.

Kennor worked his way through the stations, getting SITREPS from men and woman young enough to be his children. They all reported the same thing: blockade after blockade was falling to the Variants.

Even as the other bases across the country fell, Kennor had still thought they were safe here. He’d been wrong—again.

“Get a message through to Cheyenne Mountain,” Kennor said. “Inform President Mitchell we’re being overrun.” He hadn’t spoken to the President in several days, and he was the last man Kennor wanted to talk to now. He’d spend his final moments with soldiers, not talking to weak politicians.

Harris hesitated and then hurried away. “Right away, sir.”

“Somebody show me a feed of the evacuation,” Kennor shouted.

“Over here, sir,” Corporal Van said. He was the same man who had informed Kennor when Raven Rock had fallen to the Variants. Now he was about to show him the evac of their own bunker.

Kennor hurried over to Van’s station, his eyes roving from monitor to monitor as he crossed the room.

“Who’s made it out so far?”

Van looked up with rueful eyes. “General Johnson and Lieutenant Colonel Kramer are in the air, sir.”

“That’s it?”

“From your executive team, yes, sir,” he replied. “Colonel Wood and his men are on their way through the escape tunnels now.”

“Anyone else?”

“Congressman Hauber, Senator Long, and a few civilians, sir,” Van said. He cupped his hand over his headset and looked away.

Kennor turned back to the last remaining feed at the front of the room. The Variants were heading deeper into the base.

“How the fuck are they getting through the blast doors?” Kennor asked.

“They aren’t,” Harris said. “They’re using the ventilation and sewer systems.”

“Jesus,” Kennor said. He pulled the magazine out of his .45 and checked the bullets. It was an old habit. He already knew the mag was full. He jammed it back into the gun and pulled back the slide to chamber a round.

“Listen up, everyone,” Kennor shouted. “Grab a gun and prepare to fight. If the Variants break through the outer defenses, they will find us—and when they do, we fight to the end. Every last one of us. You got that?”

A flurry of youthful voices rang out from every direction. All of them were yelling the same thing: “Yes, sir!”

Outside the doorway of the FEMA warehouse, Valentine flashed a toothy grin. His team was already loading boxes marked Fragile into the back of a Ford Super Duty truck.

“Looks like Bravo hit the jackpot,” Horn said.

Beckham squeezed past Valentine to stare into a room carved out of rock with a ceiling twenty feet high. The space stretched as far back as he could see. There were thousands and thousands of shelves piled high with boxes that had the FEMA symbol on them. Arrows painted on the floor and signs hanging from the shelves showed an organized and impressive facility.

It was like a grocery store without the employees.

Horn let out a low whistle and strolled into the cavern. His wide eyes had fixated on a sign that read Liquor. Beckham remembered Jensen’s request and tapped Horn on the shoulder. “Only if you find a case of chew for the Lieutenant Colonel, too.”

Horn huffed and let his grin fade. “Now ain’t the time to be thinkin’ about drinkin’, right, Boss?”

“Right. Let’s start loading the truck,” Beckham said. He checked his mission clock. They’d been inside for twenty-two minutes, and he hadn’t heard jack shit from Mikesell.

Beckham flicked his mini-mike to his lips and opened a channel to all three of the strike teams. “Alpha 1, Charlie 1. Do you copy? Over.”

Static crackled in his earpiece. He waited a few seconds and then tried again. “Alpha 1, do you copy? Over.”

“Already tried three times,” Valentine said. “Headsets are useless down here. Too much rock.”

“Shit,” Beckham muttered. He paused to think as the other men loaded the truck. In some ways, fighting wasn’t all that different than a game of high stakes poker. Going into a mission without having a plan for insertion and escape was like playing a bad hand of cards with shit odds of winning. Now Beckham was deep underground, surrounded by rock and dirt, with no way of contacting Alpha team.

Beckham jerked his chin toward the Ford. “Is that the only truck you guys found?”

“The only one we saw,” Valentine replied.

Beckham checked the other end of the tunnel. There had to be other vehicles somewhere inside. He cursed under his breath and smacked the bed of the pickup truck. “Let’s get her loaded up and out of here.”

Chow slid a box into the bed of the truck. “Going to need to make two, maybe three trips. There’s a ton more boxes.”

Beckham looked over his shoulder at the single man Valentine had posted on sentry duty.

“Jesus,” Beckham said, shaking his head. It was a rookie mistake that could cost them their lives and the mission.

“Valentine, hurry this shit up. I’ll hold security with Chow to the south. Get two of your men to set up position to the north where you came in. I want everybody else loading boxes,” Beckham said.

Valentine acknowledged with a grunt.

Beckham whirled away before he gave the junior NCO a dressing down in front of the other men. He scanned the hallway leading toward the middle of the complex for a second time. There wasn’t much cover besides a forklift and a pile of crates. Not the greatest place to make a stand. Then again, Beckham wouldn’t want to make a stand anywhere in this maze.

He followed Chow to a pile of boxes. Halfway down the corridor, he saw a sign that read Domestic Reservoir. The passage curved to the right where there was a second sign for the East Power Plant.

“Wish Jinx were here to see this place,” Chow said in a low voice. “He always had a hard-on for bunkers. Used to say that when shit hit the fan, he was going back to the one on his parents’ farm. Apparently his dad was a paranoid son of a bitch. He built the bunker thinking the Soviets were going to nuke us.”

Beckham kept his rifle shouldered with an ear in Chow’s direction, listening to his whispers. Something about the old stories helped him relax.

“Remember that time Panda and Riley got into it at the Bing?” Chow said with a half grin. “Riley said Panda was hogging the dancers that night. But it really boiled down to the fact they both wanted the one with the big-ass booty. Do you remember that chick’s name?”

“Tank.”

Chow chuckled. “Yeah, that’s the one.”

“Same night that Riley danced in his underwear on stage.”

It had also been the last night out Team Ghost had ever enjoyed together. Beckham blinked away the memories and scoped the passage.

“Keep sharp,” he said.

“Sorry,” Chow replied. He gently smacked the side of his helmet and centered his gun on the hallway.

Beckham flung a glance over his shoulder. The pickup was almost loaded. He pushed the mini-mike back to his lips to try Horn on the comm. He wasn’t far, but Beckham didn’t want to leave his post.

“Charlie 2, you copy? Over,” Beckham said.

“Roger, Boss.”

“Take Charlie 4 with you on the first load, leave the pickup, and return with another vehicle. There were plenty outside.”

“Copy that,” Horn said. He emerged from the warehouse a moment later, his tattooed arms flexing under the weight of three boxes. After laying them into the bed of the truck, he popped a thumbs up and climbed into the cab. Lombardi jumped in the passenger side.

The diesel engine coughed to life, and the sound of human engineering filled the tunnel for the first time on their mission. Despite the reassuring noise, Beckham felt his gut tighten. The narrow tunnels carried sound like a gong in a temple.

Horn maneuvered the truck around a forklift and then pulled away. Valentine’s team continued stacking boxes outside the entrance to the cavern. Things were going smoothly.

Too smoothly.

That meant shit was about to happen, Beckham could feel it in his bones. As he turned back to the south and raised his rifle, the pain from the stitches lanced down his arm.

For fifteen minutes, Beckham and Chow waited there in silence. Beckham endured the burn of his injury as he stood with his shoulders squared. By the time Horn returned with a new truck, Beckham’s M4 was trembling in his hands and perspiration was cascading down his forehead.

“Crates are secure,” Valentine said. He set a final box at the entrance to the warehouse as Horn sped down the corridor in an early 90s Dodge Ram coated with rust. The clanking of metal sent Beckham’s heart beating out of control. It was way too fucking loud. He strained to listen over the mechanical chatter and pivoted back to the south. Chow was sweeping his rifle over the shadows, waiting, watching.

Horn parked the Ram outside of the warehouse and shut off the engine. A sharp popping instantly followed. At first, Beckham thought it was the muffler, but the second crack confirmed this wasn’t the mechanical failure of the Ram—it was gunfire. A flurry of the cracks rang out in the distance. Beckham’s heart rate escalated with every shot.

Chow looked around wildly. “Where’s it coming from?”

“Load the truck!” Beckham shouted. “Lombardi, on me. Horn, you too.” They formed a human wall, their weapons angled to the south where the majority of the shots seemed to be reverberating.

He had a decision to make: provide support to Alpha or retreat with the drugs? Without having any way of contacting Mikesell, he couldn’t know how bad things were or if they could even help.

Beckham looked from the southern tunnel to the truck. Once it was loaded, he felt the burn of eyes on him. With a heavy heart, he made his decision. The drugs were the most important part of the mission. Mikesell and Alpha were on their own.

“Move out,” Beckham said.

“Wait!” Chow said. “What’s that?” He trained his weapon on a vehicle zipping down the tunnel to the south. Beams from its headlights caught Beckham in the face. He shielded his eyes as a Humvee came screeching to a stop a few hundred feet away.

Beckham raised his gun and zoomed in on the bloody face of a Medical Corps soldier in black fatigues who stumbled out of the truck. Weaponless, the man waved his arms frantically and screamed for help.

The Dodge Ram crackled to life behind them, and Beckham glanced over his shoulder to see Valentine in the driver’s seat. The rest of his men were piling into the truck.

“Let’s go!” Valentine shouted.

Beckham turned back to the Humvee. The soldier from Mikesell’s team collapsed in front of the truck and then pushed himself to his feet, screaming, “We need help! We found survivors, but the Variants are everywhere!”

Beckham closed his eyes for a brief second, his mind shifting from thoughts of Kate to everyone else on Plum Island. They needed him there, but so did the survivors trapped down here. He wasn’t going to leave soldiers or civilians behind. Not if he could help. He couldn’t abandon anyone.

“I’ll go. You guys get the fuck out of here,” Beckham said.

“Like hell,” Chow said.

“Not leaving you, Boss,” Horn said with a snort.

Lombardi looked at the staggering soldier and then back at Beckham. “I’m with you.”

Beckham turned to the loaded truck. “Valentine, get the drugs to the choppers! Tell Echo 2 and Echo 3 to stand by for our extraction!”

Valentine held his gaze for the briefest of seconds and then nodded. The wheels of the Ram screamed, masking the distant gunfire as Valentine peeled away. By the time Beckham turned back to the tunnel, his team was already running for the Humvee.

Ellis sat on the stoop of Building 1, his head in his hands.

“How are you feeling?” Kate asked, taking a seat next to him.

“Did I ever tell you I’m a hypochondriac?”

Kate smiled. “It’s remarkable you became a doctor in this field, you know that? You’re afraid of needles and diseases.”

Ellis cracked a half grin. “That’s what my mom said!” His smile disappeared when he grabbed his stomach. “Feeling a bit sick, not going to lie.”

Kate checked her watch. It had been a little over an hour since she had injected Ellis with Kryptonite. Nausea was the one side effect she had planned for. She was feeling some of that herself, but mostly because she was worried sick. Beckham and the others would have landed at Raven Rock now. Operation Extinction was well underway.

“Do you feel anything else?” Kate asked.

Ellis shook his head. “Nope, just sick to my stomach.”

“Hey, Doc!” came a voice.

Kate raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. Riley and Meg were making their way down the pathway. “Good job, Meg. You’re doing great,” Riley said as she hopped along on her crutches, keeping pace with him. Kate felt a mixture of sadness and happiness at the sight. While she was pleased to see the two together, it made her miss Beckham even more.

Riley stopped and locked his wheels at the bottom of the steps. He twisted in his chair to look in all directions. Then he waved Kate and Ellis down the steps.

“Everything going okay?” Riley asked. “Those Medical Corps soldiers giving you any problems? I’ve had my eye on them.”

Kate flung a quick glance over her shoulder. Cooper and Berg were chatting inside the lobby of Building 1. She could see their smug faces through the windows.

“Everything’s fine for now,” she said.

“You’d let me know if they gave you any trouble right, Kate?” Riley said.

She nodded and changed the subject. “You hear any updates about Operation Extinction yet?”

“You mean about Beckham?” Riley said, grinning. He shook his head. “Nah. Probably won’t hear shit for a while.” He shifted his gaze to Ellis. “What’s wrong with you, Doc?”

“Nothing. I’m fine,” Ellis said. He grimaced as his gut made a complicated sound that Kate could hear from where she stood.

“We better get you some anti-nausea meds,” Kate said. “Come on.”

“Wait,” Meg said. She hopped closer to the stairs and searched Kate’s eyes like she was about to ask the most important question in the world.

“The weapon you made,” Meg said. “Is it really going to work?”

Kate reached down to help Ellis up and said, “We sure hope so.”

“Me too,” Meg said, turning to face in the direction of New York. “I want to believe I can go home someday.”