Beyond Armageddon V: Fusion (50 page)

But they had not merely been killed. No, Voggoth’s pets had taken the time to inflict maximum suffering, as was their modus operandi. While the majority of soldiers had met their fate with rifles in hand, the preponderance of civilians died in a much crueler fashion: skewered on tree limbs, smashed beneath slabs of building debris, splattered against walls.

Nina saw more than murder here. She saw anger. She saw retribution. Whatever motivated The Order, part came from sheer hatred. A hatred for life. This had always been obvious in the manner by which Voggoth’s followers slaughtered. But the spectacle at Harrisonville showed a measure of frustration. Perhaps even panic.

Still, amidst the carnage the group found one precious gift: a deuce-and-a-half truck with gas in the tank.

They traveled southeast on Route 7, reaching Garden City by nightfall. There they drew the attention of more stragglers, this time a stranded Intelligence Alpha Team of four operators dry on ammo and out of mission objectives. Since their transport was three days overdue they thought it best to join the party.

The group caught some sleep in Garden City and on the morning of June 13
^th
they completed their journey to Clinton.

Nina did not know what to expect there. Indeed, she did not really know why she had sent survivors to that town. It had been no more than a speck on the map; a place close enough to friendly lines that perhaps command could send transport.

The historic downtown square of Clinton lay in ruins. The courthouse, shops, restaurants—all piles of rubble. Nina jumped from the army truck and stumbled toward the mess of a place. She saw chunks of concrete, wooden planks, pieces of furniture, and shattered glass spread across thousands of square yards all under a late-morning sun blazing from a crystal-blue sky.

I’m the one who sent them here.

She could not remember how many she encouraged to make their way to Clinton. A couple dozen, at most. But what had she sent them to? Rubble.

Nina took a hand and ran it through the soft curls of her blond hair while she shut her eyes tight.

Trevor would not have sent them to rubble. He would have—

The sound of a rock rolling over the pile of debris grabbed her attention, followed by the sounds of glass cracking and shoes shuffling.

They came from the piles of rubble, from between the broken planks and the holes where buildings once stood; from caves inside the hills of debris, from the wrecks of burned-out cars.

Dozens. Hundreds. Their clothes covered in a layer of brown dust. Their eyes glazed as if questioning the reality of the woman standing before them.

“Cap—Captain?”

The voice came from a man in soldier’s garb. A corporal. His arm still in a sling the way it had been when they first met at Fort Larned where the Dark Wolves closed The Order’s implant facility. She had entrusted him with those survivors; the first person sent to Clinton.

He stumbled from the rubble as more and more people dared step into the open to greet the arrivals.

Before Nina could answer the corporal, her head snapped around at the sound of a dog barking. Odin darted out between over turned buses and raced toward her with his curled Norwegian elkhound tail wagging furiously.

She smiled and knelt. The dog nearly bowled her over in a rare sign of affection from the otherwise stoic canine warrior.

“Captain, I hope you don’t mind,” the corporal said. “On our way here we found some others and, well, brought them along. We’ve been waiting for you.”

Nina patted Odin on the head and then stood. Her eyes moved through the crowd and she saw a curious thing. She saw them watching her with a mixture of curiosity and awe.

We’ve been waiting for
you
.

She envisioned the corporal on his journey telling each band of people he came across that Captain Forest told him to head to Clinton. No doubt those words served as a glimmer of hope for people who thought no hope remained. Her arrival had become the event for which these people waited.

Smiles—tentative, unsure—sprung among the crowd of men and women, young and old, black, white and other. All nearly identical in appearance thanks to the cover of filth.

“We found some food stocks along the way,” the corporal explained with a hint of pride in his voice, as if wanting to impress the Captain with his work. “We also scavenged some weapons and ammo from a destroyed convoy up in Harrisonville. It’s not much, but it’s a start.”

Vince’s voice called from the truck, “Nina! Hey, what have we got here?”

Nina’s eyes passed over the gathering flock. As she met each one, their faces brightened. Some of their resolve returned. Some of their
hope.

What have we got here? We’ve got an army.

They gathered over the burned out and blasted remains of the last army. Overhead a churning mass of gray and black clouds boiled; bolts of lightning flashed, thunder echoed.

They paid no attention to the blobs of bio mass and shards of metal remaining from the shattered formations of commandos, monks, and ogres. They did not come for these things; they came only because the Master called; because they knew nothing more than an instinct to fight and maim.

Gangs of Mutants mustered among the burned-white branches atop Siloam Mountain park. They rarely gathered in groups larger than a dozen. Now a thousand came together, some riding hover-bikes, others in saddles atop bipedal lizards, all brandishing blunt weapons, swords, and their trademark flintlocks.

Bomb craters littered the pavement of Isley Boulevard. Between those craters and to the flanks of the road among the ruins of a bedroom community stood row after row of the six-legged crazy robots nicknamed ‘Roachbots’ . Nearly 5,000 of the insane machines waited there, including hundreds of the two-legged walking cannon Mortarbots.

A harsh wind blew over the lines of what had once been the Feranite race which now resembled thick iron bars with three legs and a metallic maw like a computerized Venus fly trap. Their arms sported Gatling guns. The hideous machines—only a year into their new existence as part of Voggoth’s minions—wobbled in the gust from two spinning whirlwinds raging back and forth across the greens of the Excelsior Springs Golf course.

Voggoth had called all his children to battle, from walking statues that had earned the nickname of ‘Stone Soldiers’ to a horde of the lumbering, red-eyed Deadhead monsters, to huge rolling balls covered in eyes and mouths, to thousands of the grayish-skinned skull-headed Ghouls that bound about and snarled like rabid apes.

They joined what remained of The Order’s core army: hundreds of metallic commandos, a thousand or so monks with swords and forearm guns, handfuls of walking missile launchers, hovering shell tanks, and half-machine/half-monster artillery pieces.

At the rear of the group loitered a quartet of gigantic Goat Walkers surveying the army spread around their cloven feet through red eyes on goat heads. But even those demonic beasts trembled in the shadow of three Leviathans.

The army of Voggoth waited as more and more numbers swelled its ranks. Monsters conjured from nightmares. Soldiers recruited from Hell. Machines powered by madness.

And then—on the morning of June 20
^th
—they moved as if of one mind and marched to battle.

The last battle.

21. Voggoth

“Why do we humans have such a feeling of strangeness? Is this necessary? I have not yet considered it deeply, but it may be important to our self-preservation. We must complete the map of the uncanny valley to know what is human…” 
–Masahiro Mori, The Uncanny Valley

The ground and the sky shared much in common: both charred black. Overhead that came in the form of storm clouds seemingly made from swirling soot. They shielded the land from the summer sun; it felt more like a frosty fall day.

Below, the terrain might have once been full of fruitful foothills, but now lay covered in a fine grain of charcoal dirt lacking any fertility. Even the smattering of weeds scattered here and there were long dead.

Ahead of Trevor the land rose to a lip of rock like the outer rim of a crater. The map identified the area as Satka, Russia, but some great upheaval had terra-formed the land into something an astronomer might expect to find on the harsh worlds of Mars or Venus. It felt wrong. Warped. Diseased. Dead. And devoid of hope.

He stepped to the parapet with JB at his side. It dropped away in a soft slope of gravel and more black dirt. A few dozen feet below the ground leveled again. Trevor reconsidered. This did not appear to be a crater, but a place where a great mass of Earth had sunk.

At the bottom of the hill the land stretched east on a plain of black soil and dried stalks that might have once been trees. Something had flattened the foothills approaching the Urals. No sign of Satka remained. No crushed buildings. No rubble. No stretches of street, no lamp posts, no trees—nothing.

The mountains themselves also suffered the devil’s touch. Trevor saw a massive wall stretching hundreds of feet in the air like a frozen tidal wave of rock devoid of color; as if a God’s bulldozer had dug apart the land, turning it into something cold and harsh; a fitting landscape for a circle in Dante’s
Inferno
.

Three miles across the stamped-flat plains at the foot of the barrier wall of rock waited the Temple of Voggoth: an infection of green and red bubbling from the surface of a cancer-ridden Earth. Spires of twisted vine reached hundreds of feet into the air from a convex roof lined with ribs. Wisps of smoke or steam slipped into the evening sky from hidden vents.

Smaller buildings—some round, some square, some domes—flanked the main hall like a cluster of foul warts.

Through a set of field glasses, Trevor spied a small group of defenders—mainly Spider Sentries—positioned around the facility; nothing that could not be handled in a few short minutes by Alexander’s approaching army.

“Is that where it is, Father?”

Trevor lowered his binoculars and found his son’s eyes.

“Yes, JB. Are you—are you afraid?”

Jorgie did not answer at first but his eyes wavered. He told his dad, “I trust you, Father.”

“Trevor!” Alexander’s voice interrupted. “You have to see this. Come here.”

The Englishman beckoned them away from the cliff and off the dusty path that had served as the main road to their destination. As they followed Alexander, Trevor took stock of his forces. They came from the west, a line of headlights spaced between packs of horses and carts, motorbikes and trucks. The collective sound of their engines made the ground tremble and filled a dark sky—far too dark for early evening—with a steady roar. Somewhere off in that dark sky a helicopter whirred.

He knew they would keep coming. In the ten days since marching through Zhytomyr, Alexander managed to tighten their formations a great deal. Yet still, the long snake of an army stretched for miles and they would arrive piecemeal at a continuous rate for the rest of the day, if not longer.

“Come on, Trevor! You have to see this!”

With Royal Marines on their flanks, Trevor and JB followed Alexander through an orchard of small trees that were now nothing more than tall sticks. It appeared to Trevor that something had sucked the life out of the plants so fast that they did not have time to fall. He saw what amounted to be tree skeletons propped upright in neat lines.

At the end of the orchard they came to a gentle hill that sloped away to the south forming a huge bowl of sorts ringed on all sides by more hills.

Gaston—the lanky black man who scouted for the Europeans—stood at the top of that gentle knoll with Armand and a small group of biker-cavalry.

“Father? What is it?”

Trevor made out things of various shapes and sizes filling the small valley, but no movement.

“My God,” Armand—standing next to his ride in his biker’s leather—muttered. “I think I have never seen the like. Am I really seeing this?”

Trevor raised his binoculars for a better view. His eyes managed to adjust to the darkness and as they did, he understood what he saw.

The tanks stood out the most. About a half-dozen Russian T-72s as still as statues. Their green armor had faded in several spots and thin coats of black dust settled across the cupolas. Their thick treads and long barrels made Trevor see them as something akin to T-Rex fossils: harmless at the moment, but fearsome to behold.

An additional pair of tracked vehicles shared the same fate as the tanks. It took Trevor’s collection of genetic memories a moment to identify them as Akatsiya self-propelled artillery pieces. Several wheeled vehicles in the form of BTR APCs also shared the graveyard of armor.

Yet it was not the tanks, APCs, or self-propelled artillery that piqued Trevor’s interest the most. That honor fell upon the dozens of empty—and some collapsed—tents, the boxes upon boxes of supply crates, the trio of tanker trucks, the collection of assault rifles and carbines lying about and—most important of all—the Russian army jackets, shirts, pants and boots scattered by the hundreds throughout the field. Enough clothes for a small army.

Gaston—who once worked for Russian intelligence—murmured loud enough for all to hear: “The 276
^th
motorized rifle regiment. Part of the 34
^th
Motor Rifle Division.”