DustOff Read online

  "You won't have to do it."

  "You sure?"

  She stretched up on her toes to show him how strong her calves were and tried to hide the shimmy in her muscles the effort cost her.

  "Think of it as making me stronger," she said.

  "If it don't kill you."

  He took one last look at the destroyed hovercraft, then at the five alien bodies arrayed and splayed on the forest floor.

  "We ought to cut off their heads?"

  "Gross," she said. "Why?"

  "I want to let those fuckers know one thing loud and clear," Lt grinned. "I'm back."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  "What is this place?" Annie asked.

  "It used to be called a Church," Lt said out of the corner of his mouth. His eyes were locked on the brick building in the clearing below the ridge.

  "I know it's a Church," she said. "That's what hit used to be. I meant what is it now?"

  Lt thought she had the right of it. It was once a Church, a big brick building with four white columns across the front facade, gone gray now from soot and pollen and anything else that filled the air.

  There was a second metal building, a gym maybe, once upon a time, separated by the asphalt parking lot.

  He was most impressed with the yard.

  Not yard, he thought, correcting himself. Crops. The grass around the two buildings had been given over to rows, turned into crops. He couldn't tell what they were from this distance. They were green though, which meant whatever they were growing was healthy.

  He watched the front door of the Church building open and a man came out, slow and steady, like he was creeping into the sunlight for the first time in forever. But his head was on a swivel, searching the woods, searching the surroundings and Lt bit back an urge to duck into the shadow of the tree next to him.

  The armor wouldn't reflect the light, he thought. The shell was an effective camouflage. He tilted his head to one side, checking on Annie. Her black grungy flight suit would keep her hidden as well.

  "What is he looking for?" she asked.

  Her voice was pitched low, as if they could be heard across the two-hundred-meter distance.

  "Us," said Lt. "Or men like us. And the Licks."

  "Not many men like me," said Annie.

  "Women?"

  "Space men."

  He chuckled and let his eyes scan the clearing, his mind keyed for danger.

  But another part of him was surprised to find just how much he liked having her with him.

  She was quick with her humor, and it seemed to fit with the kind of things he found funny or hit the far side of the absurd spectrum.

  Whatever it was, he enjoyed it in a way he hadn't enjoyed the company of anyone in almost three years.

  They watched the man walk to the door of the metal building.

  He knocked against it with the heel of his fist three times, then twice more.

  It opened, and people began to stream out.

  Haggard looking men dressed in faded worn clothes. And women that outnumbered them by almost double, each wearing a mish mash of garments.

  Like they had grabbed everything in an abandoned department store, threw it on the floor and grabbed what they could.

  No sense of fashion, but a hell of a lot of practicality. Worn as well, clothes used for work, and living, warmth and cover.

  The children that followed were much the same, though there were only a handful.

  "Twenty-seven," Annie said next to him.

  "Nah, Warbucks I count round seven."

  She crunched up her eyebrows, the wrinkles on her forehead popping in confusion.

  "I know it's tough for you to count that high with your shoes on," she said. "But there are twenty-seven people down there."

  "Kids," I explained. "I was counting kids."

  "I counted them too."

  "Only kids."

  She nodded, but like she was just going to let him have it, not that she was conceding an argument. Like she was giving him a graceful way out.

  "Why did he knock like that?" she asked. "And why wasn't he in there with them?"

  One of the little kids darted to the door of the Church, opened it up and yelled into the darkness.

  He stood back as five more children ran to join them in the parking lot, and eight women issued forth from the interior of the brick building.

  "We got us a bandit problem around here," Lt explained. "Damn fuckers are as bad as Licks. Worse in some cases."

  "Worse than Licks?"

  "Collaborators," said Lt.

  She grunted, sharing his attitude toward people who worked with the alien invaders to betray humans.

  "Should we go around?"

  Lt nodded.

  "They look pretty at peace down there. If we showed up, they might give us dinner and a place to clean up. I'd be obligated to press them to join the resistance."

  "Obligated how? Just asking."

  "My mission, before I took me a trip up into outer space and blowed up the Lick High Command ship," he nudged her elbow.

  "I think you've mentioned it."

  "Don't worry Warbucks, I'll keep reminding you. My mission was to get all the survivors on the same page. We were mounting a huge resistance to get rid of those lizard faced sons of bitches and get them off the planet."

  "You were in charge of a resistance?"

  "Nah. I was just asking folks to join up. See, I've got a bit of a reputation down here."

  "I can't tell if you're puffing up your chest in that armor," she said.

  "You bet your ass I am," he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Doc clicked off the video feed. The archive stopped, and he glared at the screen.

  He had never heard of a robot army, but that wasn’t surprising.

  He knew the government could keep secrets. Even in the age of instant information and partisan leaks, the agencies within the government managed to pull off some incredible hiding tricks.

  Usually by getting the public to focus on other things.

  North Korean nukes had been a popular distraction for a while.

  He remembered the communist crisis in Venezuela that played out as failed socialism.

  At the time, he suspected big oil wanted a piece of the off-shore rights, and now he wondered why the US sent in an experimental robot army to the country.

  “And why didn’t they use them against the Licks?” he wondered aloud.

  Curious and more curious.

  He clicked on another file, but a password screen popped up.

  It was protected.

  He tried his own password, but his security clearance wasn’t for that level.

  Burmage had been a systems analyst for the compound before the invasion. It was one of the reasons he brought people to the place, and perhaps a reason they let him pretend to lead.

  Doc got up and headed for the guarded doorway.

  He paused behind the two civilian conscripts who manned the open hole next to the locked door.

  He was particularly proud of that hole, a literal application of the phrase, “if you can’t find a way, make one.”

  Doc didn’t make the hole. That privilege fell to a young woman in the Gen One Suit who was the daughter of a contractor.

  She made the hole in the wall, reasoning that the government contractors who constructed the facility wouldn’t fill the space in between.

  She had been right, and they gained access to technology for the first time since the aliens arrived.

  Doc still wasn’t sure how they managed to turn off the world, but with the return of the Gen One suits and the solar panels on the roof of the building, they were bringing back technology.

  At a snail’s pace, he amended.

  But he would have to fix the hole. Just as soon as they got the door unlocked.

  Or we could build a new one, he thought.

  He’d order Burmage to send a party to scavenge one just as soon as he found the leader. Right after he or
dered him into the room to break the computer code, so he could see what was hidden inside.

  A stranger marched toward him from the confines of the crowded corner.

  At first, Doc though the man was going to pass by, so he stepped to one side to give him enough room.

  Doc recognized him from Russel’s entourage and took another step back. No need to antagonize the man who had taken over their camp, nor the men who worked for him.

  Lt said he was coming, and he would take care of that problem when he got there.

  Doc wasn’t quite sure how he would take care of it, but he had confidence Lt would. After all, he had rescued him from a bullet train, saved him from the Lick’s and taken him into his inner circle of confidents.

  Just as he had Steph and Jake, and look how that turned out, Doc thought.

  The stranger stopped in front of him, reached out and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. He dragged Doc back down the corridor.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  Doc didn’t feel like the man gave him much choice in the matter.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Weber opened his eyes at the sound of footsteps crushing a branch in the underbrush.

  It took a few moments for him to recognize where he was. The canopy of trees spread hazy sunshine in small patches on the bare earth outside of the cramped lean-to shelter.

  Renard stirred on the other side as he felt Weber move to the narrow opening.

  “Trouble?”

  “Deer,” said Weber.

  Renard sat up.

  “How many times have we been hunting and never seen one?”

  He glared past him at the brown fur moving through the trees fifty yards from the small clearing where they had made camp.

  “It would be a great dinner,” said Weber.

  He was tired of squirrel and rabbit. Deer would have made for a nice change.

  But he was afraid to discharge a weapon.

  No telling who was patrolling in the woods. Russel’s men. Licks.

  It was too dangerous.

  Renard moved out of the shelter and kneeled over the covered coals of last night’s fire.

  He tore strips of kindling and placed them on the glowing embers, blowing lightly until a tiny flame licked up to catch the thin shreds of bark.

  He stacked and placed small sticks on top of the fire, building it slowly until he could add larger branches.

  The dry wood gave off little smoke but would make them just as much of a target, Weber had argued.

  The cold weather had won out.

  “Do we have a plan yet?” Renard asked as he held cold fingers over the warm flames.

  “Keep running. Hide,” Weber said as he joined him.

  “That’s working out well so far.”

  Weber sighed.

  “We did our part,” the older veteran said. “Twice. I think we just don’t fight anymore.”

  “But don’t you want to?”

  “For what? What’s the purpose? We fight the Lick’s, so they don’t kill people, and people are still killing people.”

  Renard rolled his hands back in forth, bathing them in heat.

  “But running? Hiding?”

  “I should have phrased it better,” said Weber. “We are surviving.”

  Renard glanced around.

  “If you can call it that.”

  “You saw what they were doing. What they did. They’re going to get the Suits and things will get worse.”

  “We could have used our Suits to fight back,” Renard countered.

  But there wasn’t much passion to the debate. They had the discussion before. It devolved into an argument.

  Then a reluctant agreement to disagree.

  “To what purpose? How many humans would we have had to kill?”

  Renard shrugged.

  “We could have killed the bad ones.”

  Weber stood up and stretched.

  “We were the bad ones once. That’s what got us sent to Mars. That would make us no better than them.”

  Renard stood too and used the edge of his boot to scrape dirt onto the flames. He patted it down to bank the embers.

  “I didn’t say it would be easy.”

  “We just keep moving,” Weber told him. “We’ll find a place to hole up far from here. Then they can kill each other without us.”

  He walked past the shelter and knocked the stick holding up the frame away. The makeshift cover fell to the ground with a clatter of leaves and branches.

  There were no supplies to gather, no gear to load up, and in seconds, the two were on the move again, headed deeper into the woods.

  CHAPTER TEN

  They walked for days that felt like years.

  Annie was from the East coast of the US, a place Lt told her no longer existed, had not existed since the first wave of the invasion.

  "Blew it off the map," he said in an off handed sort of way then grit his teeth and shut up as she let silent tears trickle down her cheeks.

  She knew she might never get back to earth, but there had been comfort in thinking that home was still there.

  Family, though spread out and sparse, was there. Like the sun, or the blue marble floating in space, home should always be there.

  But it wasn't, and Lt sensed that he had been insensitive in the remark.

  Even if it was true.

  The sun she called reliable soon pinked her skin to a purplish shade on the scale and Lt moved them under the shade of trees just off the road they were traversing.

  The going was slower here, footing more treacherous, so they made poor time.

  Add to that her weak muscles, and shortness of breath and she was quite glad when he called a halt near a concrete bridge spanning a shallow creek.

  He led her under the arches into the cool shadows and she let out a sigh of relief.

  "Yeah," he agreed, and dropped to his armored knees next to the water.

  He dropped a bladder pouch under the surface and listened to the gurgle of bubbles as he filled it.

  "Bacteria," she warned him.

  He screwed the lid on and showed her the tip of the straw hose.

  "Filter," he held it out to her. "Now I know this ain't got that piss flavor you're used to."

  She took the tip in her mouth and bit down as she sucked moisture between her teeth and moaned.

  He grunted approval and let her almost empty the bladder before he refilled it.

  Annie sat on a large rock and crossed her legs at the ankle.

  It was tough to find a comfortable position, but being here, under the bridge and back on earth made it all worthwhile.

  "Damn," she sighed.

  Lt reseated the bladder in a pouch on his Suit and turned to face her.

  He held a finger up to his nose to quiet her and lowered the faceplate as his hands lifted the blaster from the strap.

  "I wasn't being that loud," she said in a low voice.

  Lt spun around and pointed into the trees. Annie rolled off the rock and hid behind it.

  A girl squirmed out from between two oaks, hands raised in the air.

  "Whoa," she said. "Whoa, I surrender."

  Lt motioned her to one side with the barrel of the blaster and turned it back toward the trees.

  "The rest of you, come on out."

  Two more teenagers stepped out of the woods and lifted their hands.

  "Is it safe?" Annie lifted her head.

  "Define safe," said Lt.

  The teens approached in a wary straight line, which made him think either they were tactically dumb or innocent.

  He opted for the dumb scenario.

  "Stay," he commanded and they stopped.

  He scanned the woods around them through his faceplate, but it registered nothing, showed nothing.