Invasion (The Alien Wars #1) (12 page)

“I wonder if any of the soldiers escaped,” Derek muttered.

“Maybe,” Molly said. “Doug thought there was one thousand, and even though I didn’t stop to count every single one, there must’ve been over five hundred bodies in the town that we just passed.”

“Maybe Doug will know. After all, he might have seen the fight firsthand. Let’s head toward
Tahoe
Summit
Village
and see what he says.” Kenneth turned left at the next intersection, and before long, they were driving down
Kingsbury Grade Road
.

Shortly afterward, Kenneth decided to stop and put on the tire chains. With Derek helping him, it didn’t take long. They’d just finished when Molly wound down the window and gasped. “Look!”

Kenneth glanced across the road at a bunch of trees. He frowned when he saw a man, visibly injured, walk across the snow toward them.

As soon as
Logan
saw the men with shotguns, he raised his hands. “Don’t shoot! We come in peace!”

One of the men, a bald man with scars across his face, strode forward, clutching his sawed-off shotgun. “What’s the password?”

“Password?”
Logan
questioned, not sure what was going on.

“Yeah.
What is it?” Baldy said.

“We don’t know. We’re not members yet,”
Logan
replied.

“Follow me then!” Baldy motioned his weapon at them, urging them to move.

“Where’re we going?” Xavier asked.

“To see the boss,” Baldy replied.

The prisoners followed the men as they walked through the abandoned warehouse. There were a ton of wooden crates stacked together, but seeing as the lids were down,
Logan
had no idea what they contained.

They passed a number of machines that looked as though they hadn’t been used since the attack. He also saw three vehicles that were being worked on by two mechanics.

As they passed several guards and stepped into an office,
Logan
didn’t know who these men were, but he felt confident he was in the right place.

“Boss, we have visitors,” Baldy announced, staring at a large desk chair that was facing the other way.

Logan and Xavier waited patiently for the chair to swivel around.
Logan
had no idea what the boss would look like, but as the man faced
them,
his expectations were blown out of the water.

~*~*~

Kenneth watched as the man walked closer and closer. He was dressed in some sort of uniform and carrying a briefcase. He glanced back at the others. “Stay here and keep the doors locked.”

After grabbing the shotgun, he climbed out and walked across the road. He pointed his weapon at the approaching man.
“Stop!
What do you want?”

The man, clearly exhausted, looked at Kenneth with pleading eyes. “Please help me.” He stumbled and fell down.

Despite the blood-stained clothes and his untidy appearance, Kenneth recognized the uniform of the United States Army. He glanced back at the teenagers as he lowered his weapon. “Help me.”

Derek and Molly hurried over. Brushing her blonde curls away from her face, Molly gazed at the man. “Is he alive?”

Kenneth felt the man’s pulse.
“Barely.”
He looked at the briefcase that the man was clutching. Now that he was right next to him, he realized it was unlike any briefcase he had seen. Before he could take a closer look at it, the man stirred.

“Are you all right?” Kenneth asked as he helped the man stand up.

The middle-aged man brushed his left hand up against his forehead where blood was dripping. “I’ve been better, but I’ll be okay.” He tried to walk but stumbled again.

Resting on his knees, the exhausted man looked up at Kenneth. “I need to get to
Sparks
. Can you take me there?”

“Why do you want to go there?” Kenneth asked.

“My commanding officer is heading there.” The man paused as he coughed up blood.

Molly looked at Kenneth. “We need to get him to a doctor.”

The man shook his head. “No. Not yet.” He tried to stand up. “I need to see General Loreto immediately.”

Kenneth gazed at the numerous wounds and realized that a silencer had hit him. He took out his pistol and quickly looked around the landscape. “When did you last see the Seods?”

Derek sighed as the man coughed up yet another load of blood. “You really need a doctor.”

“No, I just have to—”

“Oh no!”
Molly jumped back. She pointed to the tree line where two Seods had just emerged.

Kenneth narrowed his eyes at the creatures. They were about five feet tall and dressed in white, just like all the other Seods he had seen. He still didn’t know what kind of material it was, but it was unlike anything that they had on Earth, that was for certain. It was shiny, flexible, and so tough that bullets just bounced off it.

The helmet thing that they were wearing, which was almost like a motorcycle helmet, had some kind of visor that covered their eyes. This, coupled with the uniform, meant that it was impossible to see what they actually looked like.

He was torn from his thoughts as he realized that the two Seods had their silencers drawn and were hurrying toward them. “We need to get out of here.” He and the teens dragged the man into the vehicle as bursts of green flew toward them.

Kenneth hadn’t studied physics in high school, but from the conversations that he had heard in the last couple of weeks, he knew that these weapons were capable of firing bursts of particle-beam energy. These bursts, which he had nicknamed green bolts, were always green. Humans hadn’t fully developed this type of technology, but it was obvious that the Seods had perfected it.

Kenneth rushed around to the driver’s seat and climbed in. He had to duck as a green bolt smashed through the window, flew past his head, and then smashed through the other window.

After starting the engine, he pushed down on the accelerator. The vehicle burned rubber as it headed down the road. Looking in the
rearview
mirror, he could see that the Seods were still pursuing them. They were still shooting, but fortunately, the green bolts missed their target as Kenneth swerved back and forth.

“Hold on back there!” Kenneth bawled over his shoulder at the teenagers, who were staring through the back windshield at the Seods.

“We need to go faster!” Molly screamed.

“Put your seatbelts on!” Kenneth squeezed the wheel until his knuckles burned white. “It might be a rough ride.” He pressed the accelerator down hard against the floor. Fortunately, there was quite a number of bends in the road, which meant that after a while, their pursuers were no longer in view

As the Humvee
traveled
over the thick snow, Kenneth was glad for the chains, especially when he had to brake and turn. Even with the chains he had to be careful. If there was ice on the road and the vehicle was going too fast, no matter how good the chains were, it would be all over.

As they got closer and closer to the summit of the mountain, Kenneth realized that he couldn’t just lead the Seods to Doug’s. It’d be suicide.

“Are you all right back there?” Kenneth asked, glancing in the
rearview
mirror. As he still couldn’t see any Seods, he stopped the car. He breathed a sigh of relief.
“Looks like we lost them.”
He turned around in his seat and gazed at the teens. “Are you all okay? Nothing hit you, did it?”

Molly shook her head, the
color
slowly returning to her pale face. “But we need to get to a hospital fast. This man isn’t going to survive much longer.”

Kenneth took a closer look at the man. He looked pretty bad when they had first seen him, but he looked even worse now. “There might be a hospital in
Carson City
, but the chances of finding first aid there is pretty slim. Besides, we’d have to turn around, and I can’t do that with the Seods on our tail.”

“But what are we going to do?” Molly asked.

“We should be at Doug’s shortly,” Kenneth replied.

“What good will
that do
?” Derek questioned. “He isn’t going to have anything that’ll help us kill any Seods.”

“Probably not, but I can’t think of anything else we can do. I have no idea what the Seods want from him, but I’m going to do everything I can to save him before I give up.” He restarted the car, and after confirming that the Seods were still no longer in view, he resumed driving. As he reached the turnoff to the village a few minutes later, he slowed down and glanced back. “At least we know that they can’t run as fast as a car.”

“Maybe they decided to get into one of their aircrafts and search for us that way,” Molly suggested.

“I hope not. Anyway, we’ll soon be at Doug’s place.” Kenneth drove up the road toward the village. However, a few moments later, he gripped the wheel hard and did a U-turn.
“Duck!”

Molly looked toward the village and her face went pale as she saw three Seods running down the main street. As a green bolt just narrowly missed the car, she and Derek ducked down.

“How’d they catch up so fast?” Derek panted.

“They didn’t. They must be another group,” Kenneth replied as he pushed down on the accelerator. The vehicle roared down the road. He had no idea where he was going to go, but one thing was certain: they couldn’t stay where they were.

~*~*~

Logan
had seen plenty muscled men in his travels, but nothing like this. The guy looked as though he spent
every waking minute training
at the gym. Bulging through his blood-stained, white cotton t-shirt
were
the biggest muscles that
Logan
had ever seen.

As the man stood up,
Logan
saw that he was wearing khaki-
colored
cargo pants that were a size or two too big.

“What brings you here?” the man asked in a deep voice.

Logan
’s eyes drifted upward and into the clear blue eyes of the friendly looking man. From his tattoos and crew cut, he assumed that the man was ex-military, just like him.

“I need men with guns,”
Logan
stated.

“A straight talker,” the man said, pondering. “Hmm, you and I should get along well.”

“We need help taking down Sanchez,” Xavier stated.

“How did you hear about us?” the man asked.

“We met a guy yesterday who told us that someone was running a group in one of these warehouses and targeting Sanchez,”
Logan
said.

“Does this guy have a name?” the man asked.

“Peter. I don’t know his last name. He’s young, has a crew cut—”
Logan
said.

The man looked at Baldy. “Is that the man who came on that mission with us last night?” As Baldy nodded, the man continued speaking. “Bring him in here.” As the bald man hurried out of the room, the man turned to the two of them. “I’m Hogan, by the way. But people call me Muscles.”

“So, Muscles, you ex-military?”
Logan
asked.

Muscles nodded. “Only did one tour though before I got shipped back home due to injury.
You?”

“Did a few.
So did my friend,”
Logan
said.

Muscles seemed impressed. “We could use you guys, if you’re legit.”