Metal and Ash (Apex Trilogy) (39 page)

All looking for a Ghost to save them.

“We need Bretton, dammit!” Blue shouted. “She can build us some fucking cover!”

But Blue knew that wouldn’t happen as he motioned for his people to get to safety. Or at least the illusion of safety. Some were able to duck behind parts of the rocky shore, using the ancient volcanic rock as shields against the blasts. Most were left in the open, scrambling to get onto mag-skiffs and escape the falling shells.

Sand and chunks of rock flew in every direction as the first shells hit. People were slammed to the ground, gashes and bruises covering their bodies, as they were hit by the debris. Then as the air started to settle a slow, low humming filled everyone’s ears.

“Rips!” a tech screamed as small balls with razor sharp spikes launched themselves from the craters of the impacts.

Those hiding didn’t stand a chance as the Rips zoomed through the air, their sensors on alert for human heat signatures. People tried to fend them off, using whatever scraps of metal, rock or driftwood they could find, but the spinning Rips just bore through everything, coming out the other side and into the terrified Americans.

Screams filled the rocky beach as person after person was ripped apart, their bodies shredded by spikes spinning at close to a hundred miles an hour.

Blood poured and pooled on the coarse sand of Monterey bay.

***

“That seems to be going well,” Mr. Continental said as the Three watched the destruction on a holo in their conference room.

“Quite,” Mr. Brown Eyes grinned. “Caught them like rabbits fleeing a tractor.”

“There’s even the desired ‘chewed up’ result,” Mr. Plain chuckled. “Must be a horrible way to die.”

“All ways to die are horrible,” Mr. Continental responded. “That’s why I prefer to live.”

“Well said,” Mr. Brown Eyes nodded.

The Three watched the violence with rapt attention. Not one of them squirmed at the gruesome ends they’d brought upon the Americans.

***

“He must be somewhere,” Ms. Isely snapped. “He can’t have left the ship.”

“No, mum,” a trooper said. “But it appears he has. His quarters have been searched and we conducted a deck to deck search. If Mr. Gein is still on the ship then he’s hiding in a place we cannot reach.”

“Which is impossible,” Ms. Isely said.

“Yes, mum,” the trooper nodded.

Ms. Isely stood on the deck and her hands turned white from gripping the rail as she watched more shells launched and fall on the Americans. “Fine. He can’t harm us now anyway. Are the speeders ready?”

“Yes, mum,” the trooper nodded. “All troopers are in place.”

“Good,” Ms. Iselyreplied. “Then tellhim to launch. I want any lucky survivors put under the boot and their skulls crushed. Not a single American is to survive. Am I clear?”

“Your orders have already been relayed, mum,” the trooper said. “He was very specific.”

“I am sure he was,” Ms. Isely smiled. “It is nice to be taken seriously for a change.”

“Mum?”

“Nothing,” Ms. Isely said as she waved him off. “Go.”

“Yes, mum.”

***

Melissa shielded Beth’s body with her own as the Rips began their attack. She’d taken a couple direct hits from them, but her BC uniform held and they couldn’t penetrate. Melissa made sure she used their contact to her advantage and absorbed the BC Rips into her suit, adding more mass and substance, and better protection, with each attack.

When the first lull happened, Melissa didn’t wait to assess the damage. She knew more shells would be on their way. She could even hear Colonel Masterson screaming as such over the cries for help and mercy.

The other wounded on the mag-skiff hadn’t had Melissa’s protection and she was forced to shove their mutilated corpses from the vehicle before taking over the driver’s seat. The skiff had taken quite a bit direct damage, but Melissa had enough mechanical knowledge to direct the BC repairs and get the skiff functional. She strapped Beth in and took one last look at the bloody beach.

Before she left though she saw a person trying to stand, even under the attack that was bombarding them all. She didn’t recognize the man, but realized from his uniform that he was one of the mech pilots that had come to destroy the shield generator. Melissa swung the skiff about and grabbed him and pulled him into the seat next to him.

“Huh…,” the man grunted.

“You wouldn’t happen to be Matty, would you?” Melissa asked, but the man passed out next to her and she had to scramble to get him strapped in. Blood and death surrounded her and she tried not to cry as she looked over her shoulder.

“Sorry,” she said to those she left behind as she hit the accelerator and the skiff took off along a rocky path, up through a small patch of stunted, mutated coastal pines, and onto a barely visible road.

***

“Jesus,” Blue sighed as he knelt next to Desmond. “You just get your ocular implant and look what happens.”

“Bad, Colonel?” Desmond asked. The look on Blue’s face was answer enough. “Yeah, it feels pretty bad.”

“I can’t shit you, Lieutenant,” Blue said. “I think you have a splinter or two in your belly.”

“Is there really any belly left?” Desmond grinned as a thin trickle of blood rolled down his cheek.

“Not in the physical sense,” Blue grimaced. “You want me to take care of you, son?” Blue looked about at the few walking Americans that wove their way through the tangle of mutilated bodies. “Don’t think the medics are coming to the rescue.”

“No…sir,” Desmond gasped as a wave of pain shot through him. “I’d like to…just look up at the…sky.”

“As you wish, son,” Blue nodded and patted Desmond on the shoulder. “You’ve been a shining example to your people. You should be proud.”

“Thank…you…sir,” Desmond whispered.

Blue got to his feet and looked out into the bay and the speeders racing across the water at what was left of the Americans.

“I can make you a promise, Hale,” Blue said. “I don’t plan on giving up without fighting to my last breath. If the Americans are going to die they’ll be taking some fucking scum with them.”

He looked down and frowned as he saw the open focus of Lieutenant Desmond Hale’s synthetic eye. He leaned over and closed the eye gently.

“Godspeed, son,” he whispered. “You’re finally in a better place than this fuck hole.”

Blue walked to the closest mag-skiff and ransacked it for a weapon. He found an assault rifle and checked the rounds. Not nearly enough to take on one speeder full of troopers, let alone the dozen or so that were almost to the shore.

He started shouting at people to get the fuck away and save themselves as he walked casually into the surf and aimed his rifle at the first speeder coming at him.

***

Reginald, his new BC body humming with the need to kill, saw the colonel step into the surf and raise his rifle. A trooper to his left raised his own assault rifle and Reginald stayed him.

“I would like the honor,” Reginald said in his high-pitched voice. “Been a while since I took some blood on my own.”

Reginald lifted his sniper rifle to his shoulder, gauged the wind, took into account the bouncing of the speeder on the waves, slowly squeezed the trigger, and watched as a split second later Colonel Blue Masterson’s head exploded in a mass of blood and grey matter.

“Ahhhh,” Reginald sighed. “That feels good. Nice to have the rush back.”

“Uh, yes, sir,” the trooper responded. “Should we open fire from here, sir?”

“No, no,” Reginald replied. “Ms. Isely wants skulls crushed under boots so lets get her some juicy holo with skulls being crushed. Can’t disappoint the boss lady, can we?”

“No, sir.”

“No, sir,” Reginald grinned. “We cannot.”

***

All order, all training, all hope fled as Blue Masterson’s brains sprayed across the surf, turning the sea foam bloody pink for a few moments until the next wave came in and washed it away. The colonel’s body floated in the shallow water, unseeing, dead.

The Americans that were left on the beach went into survival mode. They didn’t form ranks, they didn’t try to organize into coherent teams; they just turned to the Three’s speeders and opened fire.

And the speeders returned the fire in kind.

Minutes. That was all it took for the Three’s troopers to wipe out the last of the rag tag group Blue Masterson had been able to hold together. Men, women, even some children, were torn apart by BC bullets, their bodies making a parody of the beach party movies of centuries before as they danced and writhed in agony until falling to the sand, dead.

Reginald stepped from his speeder, disappointed that his troopers had to use their rifles. He had really wanted to show Ms. Isely a victory without gunfire. There was something ticking, thrumming inside him, that hungered for the raw violence of a boot sole on the face of an American, pressing, pressing, until pop went the jack.

But a win was a win and Reginald came to terms with that immediately.

“Find me the Vessel Beth Laughlin,” Reginald ordered. “Bring her to me alive, please. Or dead, if it cannot be helped. But alive would be better for you all.”

The troopers eyed their new leader warily, pretty sure the psychotic gleam in his eyes wasn’t a trick of the light. None had any illusions that their lives were any more important than the dead Americans that stained the beach of Monterey Bay.

***

“Row, row, row your boat,” Stone sang as he drove the water skiff along the coastline, keeping a safe distance from the Three’s annihilation of the Americans. “Gently down the stream- Oh, wait, guess it’s not quite a stream, eh Gein?”

“Will you shut it, Stone,” Mr. Gein said as he gripped the sides of the skiff, his body rebelling against the undulating waves that rocked them to and fro. Even with the months he’d spent aboard ship he still couldn’t handle the never ending movement of the ocean. “God I need a fucking drink.”

“You need to dry out, Gein,” Stone replied as he eyed a mass of debris that had caught in a small cove just a few yards ahead. “And as soon as we make land you will get to do that. I need you thinking clearly, Gein. No more being a sodding drunk.”

“Fuck you, Stone,” Mr. Gein grumbled. “You’ve been dead for all these months. You have no idea what I’ve been up against.”

“Oh, poor Mr. Gein with his real body and livingness,” Stone mocked. “It must have been torture to sit around in a gin fueled haze while Ms. Isely did all the work. My heart goes out to you.” Stone let out a sharp laugh. “Oh, wait! I don’t have a heart!”

“Careful Pinocchio,” Mr. Gein snarled. “I think I see a whale. Might swallow you right up.”

“Oh, papa, no!” Stone laughed. “How will we ever escape?”

Mr. Gein and Stone stared at each other for a moment then burst out laughing.

“I have missed your insubordinate idiocy,” Mr. Gein grinned. “It was boring as fuck all on that ship.”

“I’d say I missed your paper pushing ass, but I’d be lying,” Stone grinned back.

“Fuck you, Stone,” Mr. Gein smiled.

“Whatever gets you through the day, Gein,” Stone replied.

The skiff thumped against the floating debris as Stone steered them into the cove.

“The last of the Americans,” Mr. Gein said as he watched the debris part around the skiff. “Just a bunch of junk.”

Stone glanced over the side of the skiff and nodded. He started to turn his attention back to the beach ahead, but stopped as he noticed a hunk of BC amidst the other flotsam. He put the engine in reverse and tried to steer closer to the BC hunk.

“What is it?” Mr. Gein asked.

“I’m not sure,” Stone said. “Help me get it into the skiff.”

“Why?” Gein asked. “Do we need more BC mass?”

“It’s not BC,” Stone smiled as he grabbed the hunk and hauled it up out of the water. “Not all of it.”

Mr. Gein helped get it onto the deck of the skiff and stared in amazement.

“Is that…?” he asked.

“I believe so,” Stone replied. “Things just got interesting.”

***

The first thing Charlie Masterson noticed as he came to was that he was no longer floating. Waves of vertigo still washed over him as his body adjusted to the lack of constant movement, but he knew he was on solid land. But when he opened his eyes he couldn’t say for sure that he was safe.

“Hello, boyo,” Stone said as he knelt close to Charlie’s face. “You look lost? Did a jack fall out of a box and get separated from his shipmates?”

“Stop fucking with him and put some wheels on the skiff, Stone,” Mr. Gein snapped. “We don’t have time to taunt the kid.”

“I’m not a kid,” Charlie grunted, his throat raw and dry. “I’m-.”

“I don’t give two standing fucks what you are, jack,” Stone said as he stood up and walked to the water skiff he had been converting into a mag-skiff for the land. “All I care about is making sure I put you to good use.”

“Let’s get a good distance from Monterey before we contact the enemy,” Mr. Gein said. “Don’t want them zeroing in on us here.” He knelt next to Charlie. “You might just be how we survive this hellish wasteland.”

“Fuck…you,” Charlie rasped.

“Keep on fighting,” Stone said. “I’d expect nothing less from a fucking jack.”

Charlie did fight to keep his eyes open, but fatigue and exposure took over and he drifted back into unconsciousness.

Forty-Five

They saw the movement in the massive dust cloud and Masters looked up at Stomper from his cockpit.

“You ready for this, big guy?” Masters asked as he double checked his weapons systems. “That’s a lot of dead weight coming at us. We fuck up once and they’ll have us on the dirt.”

“They will have you on the dirt, Pilot Masters,” Stomper replied. “I have no flesh inside me. I am not their target.”

“Then you better watch my fucking back,” Masters said as he started to walk his mech towards the giant mass of deaders. “Remember the plan?”