The Tenth Legion (Book 6, Progeny of Evolution) (32 page)

* * * *

The flotilla
arrived less than an hour after the last of Ed’s guerrilla force
left. The pace, together with the difficulty of what Ed planned,
couldn’t be slowed by human or hybrid. To Cynthia’s open
disappointment, Ed decreed Valeria stay behind. Surprising
everyone, the young hybrid seemed relieved. Lorna assumed the
inconveniences of jungle living outweighed Cynthia’s
companionship.

Five frigates
surrounded a helicopter carrier and a troop ship. The frigates
patrolled the sea outside of the harbor while the troop ship
ventured closer in, unloading human cargo and equipment to
amphibious craft of various types. Humanity and supplies piled up
steps away from the café she and Ed held so dear. After forming up
in pre-determined groups, the soldiers deployed in different
directions. Finally, Ulbert’s small form came alongside, nudging
her elbow. “There are some gentlemen here.” His grave quiet
suggested nothing pleasant waited for her.

Lorna followed
him through the operations center to a conference room. Inside, a
swarthy two-star general stood erect behind a pair of folded arms.
With a square, dark head and black moustaches, he reeked of
peppered spices vainly attempting to compete with ingrained body
odor. Two officers and a civilian accompanied him.

“Hello,
Lorna,” said the civilian. “We do seem to meet in the strangest
places.”

For a moment,
Lorna’s voice deserted her, gawking while the rangy man turned.
Several seconds passed before she regained the power of speech.
“Bobby. What brings you here?”

“Ten years of
working with Gen El had to count for something. I made a lot of
contacts while doing dear Father’s work. My new partners and I put
our heads together, and with the help of our friends in Mexico
City, came up with this wonderful win-win plan.” Bobby beamed with
self-satisfaction. “Oh, I guess it’s not win-win for everyone. You
and dear Father, along with the rest of the scum, lose out, don’t
you?”

He spat out
the words “Dear Father”.

“What’s the
plan, Bobby?” Lorna asked.

“Simple. East
Mexico gets this strategically valuable base. I run things for
them. The job includes killing every woofer we find who fled to the
jungle. Like I said, a win-win.”

“What about
the humans? Are you going to kill them, too?”

Bobby
contemplated a large, winged insect that had somehow ended up in
the room after taking a wrong turn. The brightly colored bug
awkwardly picked its way across the carpet, searching for an
opportunity to take flight. Finding a draft, a pair of orange wings
deployed.

Bobby casually
crushed the unfortunate creature underfoot. “We won’t kill too
many. We need some to run the equipment. Most will jump at the
chance to work for Gen El. We don’t have as good a medical program
or retirement, but there are other inducements.”

This vile man.
How did I not see him for what he is?

“What about
The Others who stayed behind? How will they be treated?” she asked,
not sure whether there were any besides her.

Bobby rolled
his eyes in a tease, the expression a cat has for a cornered mouse.
“Depends on how they treat me.”

Sounds of a
small commotion came from the hallway outside. Two young soldiers
entered with Valeria between them. Each had an arm, and seemed
intent on pulling her apart. To Lorna’s surprise, the young woman
showed aggravation rather than fear.

“We found her
in one of the rooms,” one reported in Spanish.

At a casual
hand wave from Bobby, they released her. “She’s mine.” With the
slightest of finger motions, he motioned for her to come to
him.

To Lorna’s
amazement, she slipped into position beside him. His arm wrapped
her shoulders. No one in the room could fail to see the gleam of
adoration in her eyes. Lorna remembered Clarisse, her predecessor,
and hoped Valeria understood the peril her youthful adventuring had
gotten her in.

Observing
Valeria’s snuggles against Bobby, Lorna sensed his desire ranged
beyond possessing the young hybrid. He wanted her too, but not
until “Dear Father’s” children were out of the way. In the old
days, the new alpha male destroyed the spawn of his predecessor,
filling the females with his young. Filing the frightening scenario
in the back of her mind, Lorna calculated how to turn the situation
to her advantage.

The general
spoke. “The airstrip must be prepared. We have aircraft arriving in
four hours. There will be many of them.” He eyed Lorna coldly. “We
expect to defend against sizeable resistance.” Whether he spoke
about Ed’s force or a Brazilian response, Lorna didn’t know.

The general
didn’t have to wait long for an answer. Upon receiving word of the
arriving aircraft, Lorna went to the mansion’s highest vantage
point. From there, the landing lights of the airstrip made two
parallel lines through the night. Lycan eyesight allowed her to see
what happened. The Others attacked the sentry posts on the jungle
side of the runway. Moving faster than any human could, they defied
the conventions of marksmen who still led targets based on human
speed and agility. In minutes, Ed’s band wiped them out.

Surrounded by
fresh kills cooling in the breezy night, Ed’s challenge would be to
keep the band focused. He would exhort them to not to feed. Later,
there would be time. The priority was to make the runway unusable
for the arriving aircraft.

Packs of
lycans and vampires met the first wave the instant the landing gear
dropped. The air crews must’ve had just enough time to be confused
by the dark, furred or large, sallow, humanlike creatures sprinting
alongside before the apparitions blasted away with automatic rifles
or hurled explosives. Quickly, two dozen fires marked ruined
aircraft with their dead crews. With the airstrip unusable, the
rest of the flight turned back. On the return, six of them ran out
of fuel, dropping into the sea.

With the
battle over, Ed would address the two hundred sets of gleaming
feral eyes surrounding him in front of a pile of cooling human
corpses. “Carry our kills back to camp. Tonight we feast.”

A cacophony of
The Others voices, lycan howls accompanied by vampire cheers,
filled the darkness. Lorna heard them back in the mansion as they
intimidated all other night sounds into silence. “Go get ‘em, big
boy,” she muttered to herself.

* * * *

Ulbert’s
sources of information kept Lorna up to date. Through him, she
learned that each night over the following week, Ed’s people struck
somewhere, always against isolated small groups that let their
guard down. In morphed form they moved with speedy silence,
killing, and then carrying off the bodies. Morning reliefs found a
deserted station. Minimal spatters of blood provided the sole
indication of an attack.

“The assaults
are getting to them,” Thomas whispered to Lorna. They walked in the
gardens beside the mansion. “I overheard a major complaining how
some sentries refused night guard. The watch officer had to triple
the detail before they’d go.”

After
nightfall, Ed hit the hotel by the waterfront, where the junior
officers were billeted. Lorna was sleeping in the bedroom adjacent
to Ed’s office when the sound of rifle fire awakened her. She threw
back the drapes. The waterfront and bay seemed unchanged. The pale
silvery light of a new moon beamed down on everything. Behind the
hotel, the illumination profiled the bridge and masts of the
troopship moored dockside. Then, repeating orange flashes reflected
like strobe lights off the walls inside some of the hotel’s rooms,
followed a second later by the tapping of automatic rifles, like an
impatient fingernail on hard wood.

A lingering
explosion blew out a floor full of windows. For several seconds, a
feathery flame illuminated the street in front of the building.
Dozens of running figures filled the scene before the relative
darkness of light from the fingernail moon reclaimed everything.
The humans were no match. Darkness provided no barrier to The
Others’ superior senses, and they could break a neck in an instant.
Another explosion showed a glimpse of growing numbers of inert
bodies sprawled on the greens and village square.

Minutes later,
the melee ended. Silence, accompanying a white pall of slowly
coiling smoke, covered the area. Beams of vehicle headlights
crisscrossed over one another revealed a blurred scene of
slaughter. Lorna’s lycan senses alerted when a captain told his
sergeant that forty-two were killed or missing. Eight of Ed’s force
died.

Bobby,
accompanied by the smelly general, together with most of his staff,
stormed into Lorna’s office. His face flushed with rage, Bobby’s
eyes bugged out. “Up to now, we treated everyone at the mansion
like non-combatants. Well, no more.”

“What are you
thinking?” Lorna battled to keep her voice calm.

“Follow me.
You’ll see.” He turned, leading the procession of camouflaged
officers thorough the Operations Center toward the mansion’s living
areas. As they drew near, sounds of people being rousted from bed
got louder. Groggy and uncomprehending, they lined the hallways
outside their rooms. More than a hundred men, women, and children
still in bedclothes waited more or less silently.

“Put the
children aside and select every fourth adult,” Bobby said. His gaze
settled on Valeria, who forged a smile for him with her small,
delicate mouth.

Ignoring the
gesture, he turned to a colonel. A thumb jerked in her direction.
“Begin with her.”

The smile
vanished, replaced by a shocked gasp. Lorna expected Valeria to say
something to change his mind, but she stood petrified, a confused
expression on her face, until two burly privates exuding the same
odor their general broadcast took her away.

When the
colonel chose a victim, guards manhandled the unfortunate to a
holding area, ignoring the pleas of relatives left behind. Soon, a
confused crowd of twenty-five or so adults of both sexes gathered
in front of the double staircase. The soldiers marched the
bewildered group outside, dismissing the rest.

“Line them up
on the driveway,” Bobby said. The colonel hesitated, checking with
his superior. The general nodded. The soldiers formed up the
bedraggled mass of humanity into a line before a covered truck.

The crowd
became uneasy. Those not selected remained clustered together.
Above the frightened voices of the sequestered group, Lorna made
out Valeria’s husky pleas. Lorna sensed something terrible about to
happen. This wasn’t another of Bobby’s petulant, humiliating
stunts. “What are you going to do?” she demanded.

Bobby turned
up the ends of his lips. “I hope Dear Father is watching.” The
sharp pitch of his voice seethed with four decades of hatred.

Her eyes cut
to the back of the truck. The tailgate dropped with a clang,
exposing a fifty-caliber machine gun. “Do this,” Lorna said, “and
you place yourself forever beyond your father’s mercy.”

If he heard
her, he showed no reaction. With a wave of a hand, the machine gun
opened fire, sweeping the line in seconds. The large slugs knocked
each person around, holding them upright with the force of the
impact. A few tried to run, but didn’t get three steps. Valeria
took a head shot, going down as if hit by a bus. After the machine
gun fell silent, two officers walked among the bodies, finishing
off any who remained alive.

Shortly, a
servant informed Lorna that Ulbert was among the dead. According to
witnesses, the count passed him over, but he convinced the colonel
to take him instead of another younger person.

“We’re not
kidding around, Father!” Bobby shouted into the silent night.
“Attack again, and next time the body of your lycan bitch might be
lying here!” Leaving instructions to dump the bodies on the lawn
leading down to the lake, he stalked back inside.

Lorna trembled
with rage, but after a moment, she willed herself to be calm. Not
helping matters, the babies kicked vigorously. Back in the room,
she spent the rest of the night crying for the dead, especially
brave Ulbert and poor tragic Valeria.

“
If only
I could find a way to get our people out,” she said to herself over
breakfast the next morning. Thinking about the utility passageway
ending at Cynthia’s closet, she remembered something different
she’d discovered about it
. This one had a draft, which may mean a way to
the outside.

Not to
escape.

But to bring
Ed and the others in.

After supper,
she disengaged from Karla. The parting had been abrupt, even sharp.
The older woman, worried sick about Cynthia living as a feral,
wanted to talk. “She’s such a delicate girl,” Karla fretted. “That
kind of life isn’t for her.”

“We all must
do what we must,” Lorna snapped, leaving Karla to think about
everyone’s new position in the fast-evolving scheme of things.

Lorna brought
the mansion plans and a flashlight. Under a utility light, she
stripped down to morph. In the silence, she sniffed the cool dry
air for any sign of a draft. A faint current teased the dark fur
ringlets on her back, and showed the way. About a hundred feet from
the panel accessing Cynthia’s room, where a female
lieutenant-colonel now resided, the stone floor held an imbedded
iron grate. An almost soundless hiss of air rose from below. Using
a piece of scrap pipe for leverage, Lorna freed the cover, heavy
even to lycan muscle. Peering down the hole revealed a set of
ladder rungs. She was on the right track. At the bottom, another
passage led off in what must have been the direction to the
outside. The lower one had no utility conduits or lights. She
padded along the cold, wet stones with the sound of her breathing
for companionship. From her flashlight, a thin stream of yellow
light, augmented by lycan eyesight showed the way. Urine marked the
path for the return trip, not a problem, considering the liberties
the babies took with her bladder. She concluded the tunnel was
manmade, designed for a quick escape.