CHAPTER 19: THE BLESSED SOUND OF GUNFIRE

Harvey Sicara woke under the charred body of his best friend. He knew it was Morgan because he’d personalized his sno-camo helmet with a crude middle finger around a M, hand-drawn in Sharpie, under the rim, right where it now hung in front of Harvey’s vision, outlining a blackened face.

For a long time upon regaining consciousness, Harvey just stared at that crude little middle finger, trying not to look at Morgan’s face, knowing what it meant, knowing that they’d gotten their asses kicked and it had been as easy for that scaly alien fucker as a mountain lion squashing gnats.

Everyone except for him. It had thundered toward him in a ground-shaking shudder, ignoring the hail of Harvey’s SAW like it were spitballs. As casually as snuffing out candles, the thing had had blasted Morgan and Sgt. Remme, and as they screamed and baked in their own skins, it offhandedly slapped them over, slamming them into Harvey, pinning him under the combined weight of their bodies and its enormous foot. The monster had stopped, then, and turned its big yellow eye to look Harvey over as he squirmed underneath the silver scales.

It hadn’t killed him, though. It had looked amused, like a cat playing with a bug.

“Take this back to your people,” the thing had spoke into his mind—into his mind. Like fucking Jesus. “May your kind learn to properly fear and serve those who came before you, for your species has no hope otherwise. You have until my children reach adulthood.”

Then it had pressed a single, silver razor claw into Harvey’s SAW, bending it in half, and pulled its lips from its razor black teeth as it at him—smiled—and said, “Upon my return, I expect devotion. Tell your pitiful species that. Complete devotion, or I and my brood shall annihilate you all.”

Then it had lifted its foot and walked away, the mountains thundering with its footsteps as it walked back to the ship. It paused at the base of the black ramp, its silver surfaces polished to mirror reflectivity. “You have five hundred and twelve rotations of this planet around its star.” It turned, its gleaming muzzle glittering even in the fog. “Seek out my children and serve them, offer your bodies to their benefit, or you shall be killed like the useless vermin you are.”

Then it climbed back into its ship, its reflective scales lighting up the otherwise pitch black hallway beyond, and disappeared inside. The gate shut and the ramp retracted immediately after, then the ship, shaped like a crescent moon standing on end, lifted effortlessly back into the sky and slowly started back down the mountainside. Moments later, a beam of purple hit the snow, melting a thousand-foot swath of the valley in a steaming pillar that obscured the ship like a moving cloud.

A moment after that, without so much as turning around, the ship had delivered a parting blow to the tank that Harvey’s companions had positioned up there, blowing it up, the shockwave hitting him like a sledgehammer to the forehead, knocking him out completely.

Now he was awake, and wished he weren’t.

Fuck you, Harvey thought, staring at the partially-singed doodle on his best friend’s helmet. He felt hot tears on his cheeks and closed his eyes. “Fuck you…”

It had been a devastating defeat. None of their gear had worked. The communications had been down. Bullets had no effect. Their bigger weapons had been useless. Not even C-4 had made any impact whatsoever.

Humanity is going to die, he knew, remembering the screaming and the death. He and his squadron had been the best in the armed service, and they all lay burned and broken around him, still and motionless on the ground.

Eventually, however, Harvey realized he wasn’t going to die, so unless he wanted to lose limbs to frostbite, he was going to have to shove Morgan off of him and get up.

“Shit,” Harvey whispered, as Morgan’s body slumped to one side, spreading charred skin across the snow. He had several other bodies on top of him, guys who had run from the searing purple fire that the alien had shot at them, bodies that had piled up as they rolled away from the tank’s blast, but it was Morgan who had been there with him since enlisting together fresh out of high school in Kansas, getting stationed in the same place after bootcamp on the buddy system, following the same career path into the Rangers, getting stationed in Alaska for cold-weather training right before the shit broke out and Headquarters called up to say aliens were landing, the eggheads had charted their trajectory to the mountains outside Anchorage, and Harvey’s team were the only ones close enough to protect the linguists the feds had chosen to do a meet-and-greet.

The linguists had been the first to die, killed in a wash of purple fire the moment they dared to utter a stunned ‘hello.’ Then it had been a free-for-all, and Harvey, being the one chosen to hang back with the machines, had been the last one to get taken out in the slaughter that followed. He’d drawn the short straw on the ride in, and he’d been griping about it the whole morning, since it had meant he wouldn’t be able to see the aliens up close.

Now he was the only survivor.

Then he remembered Sgt. Killearn, the poor bastard who’d been chosen to stay back at base camp. Immediately, Harvey felt a rush of excitement that another member of his team might still be alive, and he started shoving himself free of the pile of corpses with renewed vigor.

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Once he got free of the bodies, he saw it was light out, but also processed the fact he was still up in the mountains. No medivac. No boil of reinforcements, no babble of guys on radios, no thrum of choppers. That was not a good sign. It meant the guys back on Ft. Rich either didn’t know what had happened to them, couldn’t get to them, or were all dead.

Judging by the smooth efficiency with which the alien had slaughtered an elite special forces team, Harvey was beginning to think it was the latter.

“Fuck,” Harvey managed, looking around. Guns, gear, and bodies lay spread over a four hundred foot swath, but a fine snow had already begun covering it.

Snow? It didn’t feel cold… Harvey pinched a small amount between his thumb and forefinger.

Not snow. Ash.

His first thought, upon seeing the ash, was that it was radioactive fallout and that he was going to die if he didn’t find shelter.

Then, realizing he’d spent enough time breathing it in that he was already dead if it was radioactive, he decided to just say fuck it and start collecting weapons and gear before it all got buried.

He created a pile of gear beside the decimated tank, over a hundred guns—forty-two machine guns, fifty-seven pistols, and two fifty-cals—two hundred and fifteen ammo cartridges, sixty-three knifes, forty-two tactical flashlights, eight ferro fire starters, sixteen lighters, no food.

That was the first basic problem he had. He’d been tumbled in a pile of arctic-geared bodies that hadn’t quite frozen yet, so the hold hadn’t gotten him yet, but this close to Anchorage, and on such short notice, they hadn’t packed MREs. It had been a ‘get up and go’ sort of thing, and Harvey wouldn’t have been surprised if his underwear were inside out, he’d been dressing so quickly in the barracks.

The closest food source, he determined, was probably going to be that little lodge down the hill where they’d parked, but sometime between the time the spaceship blew up the tank and it started raining ash, a massive avalanche—no, lots of avalanches, he noted, looking at the valley around him—had come crashing down between him and the ‘ski resort.’

So something major had happened while he’d been out cold. His guess was some sort of nuclear strike, but if that were the case, and he were currently standing in the fallout, he only had a few weeks to live, at most, and most of that would be in a vegetative state. If it was fallout, his next few hours would be crucial. He had to find a place that could counteract radiation exposure. The Mat-Su Regional Hospital was closest, though he wasn’t sure how equipped they were. Ft. Rich was the surest bet, but it was fifty miles away.

Considering his rate of exposure, however, the fact that he still wasn’t feeling ill or having any cognitive decline, Harvey decided it had to be volcanic fallout. Usually, they estimated full use of motor and brain functions for two to three hours before the shutdown started. So if it hadn’t happened yet, after God-Knew-How-Long lying under those corpses, breathing it in, he supposed it was probably safe to say it came from Mother Earth and not another Fat Man, and he wasn’t going to die from it.

Which meant the fine particles of ash would fuck up whatever engine he took back down the slopes to Hatcher Pass Ski Resort, so he’d have to plan accordingly. He could probably make it to the lodge before the engine died, but whatever machine he chose would be doomed, so he opted for one of the basic, low-end machines that the civilians had ridden up here. No need to ruin a souped-up spec-ops model if a basic one would do the trick.

Darkness came quicker than he was expecting, its arrival obscured by the fact the world was drenched in ash. He had just finished packing guns and gear onto the machine and was about to start the engine when he heard the gunfire. One single shot in the distance. Then nothing.

Odd. A signal of some sort? Harvey considered signaling back, then his training kicked in. It wasn’t an approved-upon signal code, just a single shot, so he decided that, on the off-chance it wasn’t a signal, and someone had taken out Killearn, he didn’t want anyone else to know he was alive up here.

He mounted the snow machine and was reaching for the key when he heard six more shots. Then two more, all pistol fire. His face started to heat at the idea of a gunfight. Who would be up here fighting when the aliens, the enemy, was down there in the valley? After no other sound for several minutes, he fired up the engine and gave it gas. He neglected letting the machine warm up for a few minutes first because, as far as he was concerned, the engine was about to be shot anyway, and headed off over the multiple avalanches blocking Archangel Valley, then down the pass. Once he was in a clear area, he cut the lights, going by the moonlight shimmering over the hills all around him.

Thirty minutes later, with the Hatcher Pass Ski Resort—or what was left of it—in full view in the moonlight about two miles down the valley, he shut off the engine.

The lodge and most of its cabins had been destroyed, and most of the government vehicles had been toppled onto their sides or rolled down the hill like logs of firewood. Looked like the place had been straifed by a damned air strike.

There was one cabin, however, that had dim lights flickering in its windows, and a Humvee was parked out front.

All right, Killearn, Harvey thought, grinning as he realized it had been a signal, though not the appropriate one. Good on ya. More relaxed, now, he fired the engine up and switched on the lights, hitting sixty-five in the next couple minutes it took to get to the lodge.

He parked beside the Humvee, then paused before getting off the vehicle, seeing the boulder in the middle of the parking lot.

Had that been there when we went up the Pass? he thought. He was usually pretty observant about that kind of shit, and his brain was telling him the boulder was new.

He was shaking his head at that, dismounting and deciding to get the full scoop from Killearn inside, when he saw the body slumped into the ground a few yards from the boulder.

There was no mistaking the fake park ranger gear that they had foisted upon Killearn on the ride up, making him don to cover their asses from prying civilian eyes.

Instantly upon recognizing that, Harvey threw himself to the ground on the opposite side of the snow machine from the cabin and pulled his pistol free of his leg holster, cursing his own stupidity.

Shit! he thought, racking a round. And I just rolled up here like I owned the place! He was actually surprised nobody had shot him yet.

He lay there quietly for some time, listening.

Someone was moving inside the cabin. He heard the door creak, and the crunch of snow on steps. He peeked between the tracks of the snow machine, saw snowboots on the porch.

All right, you fucker, he thought, feeling his finger tightening on the trigger. Time to die…