A few bolt weapons sounded. Maria looked back to see a couple of the soldiers dispatching the undead. She understood their anger and the unease, but they needed to keep focused on their mission.
“Keep moving. We need to make it to the gate,” she said in a firm voice.
A few of their faces registered annoyance, but the squad obeyed, trudging along behind her.
The steady stomping of feet over the well-worn terrain became a rhythm to her ears. There were small patches of grass and bushes along the path, but most of the valley had been worn away by the Scourge trampling across the ground.
Maria stepped over broken fences, barbed wire tangled around the rotting wood. The cattle and other farm animals had died of starvation after the gate had failed. The Scourge had no interest in animals, but there had been no way to rescue them. Their bones stuck out of the ground, the only markers of their passing. Maria was careful to step around the protruding ribs of one creature. It felt odd traveling across the remains of what had once been a prosperous cattle ranch. A human skull imbedded in the earth stared at them as they passed by a rusted vehicle. It was all a grim reminder of all that had gone so wrong with New Eden.
The howls of the Inferi Scourge rose steadily behind the squad. Maria cast worried looks at the carrier as it disappeared slowly from view, blocked by the growing crush of the Scourge. They were swarming the carrier.
The brisk pace picked up even more as the mass descended on their location. Maria kept an eye on her pad, calling out changes in their course as they marched. The Scourge heading toward the carrier were a wall of bodies moving rapidly toward the squad.
“Shit, look at them,” McKinney muttered.
Maria paused in her steps to watch the horde sweep past their location. The sight of all the bodies pressed together in one big wave of death and destruction was almost too much to comprehend. The wails were so loud that Maria could barely hear the comments being made around her.
“Keep moving!” Omondi shouted over the din. “Keep moving!”
The Inferi Scourge were already riled up and the sound of a human voice caused a ripple of excitement to flow through the crowd. Torn, rabid faces turned in the direction of the soldiers and a large group of the Scourge switched course to pursue.
“Move!” Maria ordered.
She broke into a run, her pack and weapon beating against her back. Her heavy boots and armor weighed her down, but free of the physical constraints of a living body, she sprinted behind Omondi. The squad ran ahead of the pack of Scourge breaking off from the main herd. The howls of their pursuers grew louder and more desperate.
“They’re coming!” someone shouted. “Run faster!”
Maria’s heavy boots pounded over the ground as she ducked around the remains of a barn.
“Hurry!”
“They’re closing in!”
The voices of the squad were edged with terror.
For a second, Maria lost sight of Omondi, then she burst into a clearing just beyond the barn and saw him leaping a low lying fence.
“Stop running!” Denman shouted. “Stop running!”
“No way! You saw what they did to Coleman!” Jameson yelled.
“Stop running! They’re drawn to our movement!” Denman’s voice was insistent.
Maria skidded to a stop. Whirling around, she saw Denman standing still, facing the sprinting creatures following him.
“Denman!” Maria cried out, fearing filling her. She was convinced he would suffer the same fate as Coleman before the Scourge realized his blood was dead, not living.
A howl erupted from Denman’s lips as he flung out his arms. The Scourge slowed, their wild eyes studying the man before them. Howling again, Denman stood still.
“Obey him!” Maria ordered.
She raised her arms toward the Scourge and joined her voice with Denman’s. Following their example, the squad’s voices rose in an eerie imitation of the Scourge howl as they stopped running and stood together.
The Scourge stumbled to a stop, their wild eyes scanning the squad. Maria screamed at them, her voice a frightening sound even to her own ears. She clearly witnessed the moment the Scourge identified the squad as their kind. The desire to rend flesh and infect vanished from their faces and confusion replaced it. Sluggishly, the group of mangled creatures turned to follow the massive horde trudging toward the carrier.
Denman slowly rotated about and raised his finger to his lips. Nodding, Maria motioned for the squad to continue their trek.
No one dared to speak as the gate loomed in the distance.
Chapter 17
The sun had peaked in the sky and was starting its descent when the squad finally made it to the outskirts of the remains of the settlements surrounding the city. Time had eroded the structures, reducing them to mere heaps of ruined metal and plastic. The perimeter fences had long ago been knocked over and flattened into the ground.
“It’s so freakin’ huge,” Jameson said in awe.
“Unlike someone we know…” Cruz joked.
Jameson threw her a nasty look before returning his gaze to the gate. “Seriously, that thing is massive.”
Maria was just impressed as he was. The closer the squad moved toward the massive gate that cut off the only pass to the valley the more intimidating it became. It was a towering testament to the engineers who had constructed the last hope of humanity within the valley. The gate was set into a steel and cement wall that rose ten stories above the valley floor. The door itself was high and wide enough to allow the large trucks that brought in the building blocks used to construct the city.
“There is no way the Scrags pushed that door open,” Cruz declared, anger tingeing her voice.
“How thick was it?” McKinney asked.
“Twelve feet,” Maria answered.
“Wow,” Jameson said. “No way in hell the Scrag assholes got in on their own.”
“Which means someone had to have let them in,” Denman pointed out.
“What kind of moron would do that?” Cormier asked.
“A moron with an agenda,” Denman answered, then hurried to catch up to Maria. In a lower voice, he said, “What if we can’t repair the gate?”
Maria gestured with her chin back toward Holm. “We have someone specially trained to deal with it, remember?”
Denman’s face scrunched up, the freckles across his nose standing out against his grayish complexion. “I know I wasn’t around for the training the month before transition, but we don’t appear to have much margin for error.”
Maria smiled ruefully. “No we don’t. That is why we can’t make any more mistakes. We can’t fail.”
Sighing, the medic shook his head. “We already lost one life and were almost attacked again. Being Boon isn’t enough to survive out here, I fear.”
“Then we stay sharp,” Maria said briskly. “We didn’t all give up our lives to be Boon just to come out here and fail.”
“I didn’t mean to-” Denman started.
“This is day one. We’re adapting. We’re learning. We can do that. They can’t.” Maria motioned toward the nearby Scourge staring blindly.
Falling back, Denman was swallowed into the ranks of the squad as Maria continued forward. Keeping her eyes on Omondi’s back, she didn’t look behind her. She knew what she would see: the anxious faces of her squad and the Scourge swarming the carrier in the distance.
And beyond that the city they were desperately trying to save.
The gate station came into view nearly an hour later. It felt as if they had been jogging toward it forever. The sun was even lower in the sky now. The whole day was slipping away as they pushed through the Scourge pockets and ran past the ruins of the old settler’s homes and farms.
As they hit an old, cracked road, Omondi burst into a full sprint past the looser packs of Scourge. Maria stuck close to his heels, pumping her arms and racing against the gust of wind hissing through the open gate looming before them.
Beyond the gate were the high summits of the mountains.
It felt as though they were at the edge of the world.
Several crashed tiltrotors lay in wreckage near a turn in the road. The craggy outcropping hadn’t allowed them to get very close to the station. The aircraft and its crew had obviously been overrun by the Scourge and crashed. Another testament to a failed attempt to close the gate. Since the gate failure, so much had gone wrong in the city.
The chain-link fence around the gate station was torn down, the rusted metal twisted into ragged teeth. Omondi leaped over a snarl of fence and pounded up the drive to the concrete and steel facility.
Maria couldn’t take her eyes off the world beyond the gate. She could see an old road, gnarled with weeds, descending downward and out of sight. The mountains beyond the gate were topped in snow and thick clouds. She was mesmerized by the sight of the world beyond the valley. It was like a dream.
“Generator over there,” Omondi called out, motioning.
“Got it!” Holm hoisted the heavy pack on her shoulder and kicked open the chain-link gate into an enclosure tucked into the side of the building.
The mummified remains of the guards who had worked at the gate were scattered across the walkway leading up to the guard station. Only bits of armor and mummified limbs tucked into thick leather gloves and boots remained of the men and women who had witnessed the failure of the gate.
