End of the Line Read online

  “Let’s go,” I said, feeling my own asshole begin to crawl.

  It had been fifteen minutes since the last shot was fired, more than enough time to get Kai units in the area close enough to engage us. We ran back to the workshop and distributed the remaining gear, which was now nothing other than our rifles and the small double packs that we hooked to our backs. One side of the pack was full of food and other essentials, the other stuffed with extra clothing, personal hygiene items, and ammo cannisters.

  “Where to, Sarge?” Jordan asked. Lowell had repaired the hole in his suit, but I could tell his arm was going to be a handicap until it healed.

  “South.”

  “To Cascade? They’ll be waiting for us there.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Doesn’t really matter now, does it?” Lowell looked around then grabbed his cannister with one glove, the other gripping the butt of his plasma rifle. “Fine. Let’s stick to the hills, but we’re going south. There’s no way we can take another leisurely stroll through the mountains.”

  “Let’s just get it over with,” I said. “Why run?”

  “Because I said so, Lofgren. That’s why. You got a problem with that?”

  I realized I didn’t, and had simply been offering an alternate solution. “No, Sir.”

  “Good. Let’s move.”

  ***

  We made it a few klicks south of Cascade before running into another Kai unit. Two mechs patrolled the area southwest of the small town, one on each side of the lake’s narrow southern end. Lowell called it out to us, and we crept by, our suits making us less than a smudge on the hazy, nighttime landscape. Half a klick later, we came to a small rise. The instant Sergeant Lowell crested it, a mech below him opened up with its chain gun. The five of us hit the deck, the sergeant sliding back down the hill until McAdams halted him.

  “Shit,” he said. “One mech, maybe fifty infantry. Didn’t get a chance to take a lazy gander to collect intel.”

  The angry red markers in my HUD looked like a welcoming party, but I didn’t want to be a guest of honor for whatever they had planned.

  “We need to go,” Lowell said, standing up. We could hear the mech making its way up the small rise. “West. Move.”

  We jumped to our feet and ran at full speed along the narrow wash. Fifteen seconds later, we heard the buzzing chain gun of the mech, along with the smaller pops of Kai infantry rifles.

  “Mooah!” Kirilenko screamed.

  I didn’t stop to see what happened. I had a good idea. Her marker winked out at the same moment her scream was cut off. I felt the packs on my back getting chewed up by small arms fire. I began to zig and zag, praying the mech didn’t just fire in a steady direction and wait for the dumbass human in a suit to wander back across it.

  “Fuck!” Jordan shouted and stumbled to the ground.

  I almost ran by him. I wanted to run by him. I liked Tyler Jordan. Even though he was an asshole. He was a good asshole, a Marine asshole. I didn’t want to like him. I refused to care about him, just as I refused to care about Kirilenko. They were done, but I was still on my feet.

  Against my will, I stopped, grabbed his good arm, and jerked him to his feet. I noticed two rounds had penetrated his suit near the small of his back. Blue fluid leaked out, but I couldn’t see blood. I began to run, pulling him along with me.

  “Let go, Lofgren!” he yelled.

  I released his arm and kept running. My HUD showed him right behind me, keeping up with my pace. Lowell disappeared over another small rise, then McAdams after. I cranked up the night vision on my visor, suddenly worried about rocks and crevices that could trip me up. I felt like giggling at the thought that for a man who wanted to die, I still had a strong will to live. Jordan and I ran up the small rise and down into a long, narrow gully that split into multiple lanes a hundred meters further on.

  “Come on,” Lowell said, taking the left lane.

  We followed him, trying to keep our heads low as Kai infantry came over the rise behind us. Most of their shots were off the mark, and the few that weren’t hadn’t been able to penetrate our suits’ energy shield. Thank God the mechs are slow, I thought, keeping my eyes to the ground. We came out of the gully and turned right, making our way into a small canyon that led into the mountains.

  “We need to keep moving south,” I said. If we got caught on a mountainside, we’d be even more screwed.

  Lowell turned on his heel and ran toward another rise. I hoped Jordan and his suit were up to the task, as the Nav-Comp said it was going to be a common thing for the next ten klicks. We stayed ahead of the Kai soldiers, and put more than enough distance between us and the mech. My thoughts alternated between turning around and walking toward the enemy, my rifle churning out plasma until it ran dry or I was killed, and wondering where the hell the Kai drones were. Or troopships. Or tanks. Why the fuck were the Kai only putting a mech or two and a platoon of infantry on the ground? Did they even know we were the same unit they’d been chasing since Hamilton? Since Little Rock?

  The Kai all looked the same to me, and humans looked identical while suited up, so… I had no idea what I was thinking about. My mind wandered, unable to focus on any single thought. I thought of the moment we’d dropped a Kai light cruiser, a terrifying warship that could function within a planet’s atmosphere. The cheers of almost two hundred thousand marines and a quarter-million civilians had rolled over the landscape, and gave us one final ray of hope that we might be able to beat these invading bastards yet. The screams of the dying over the next few days as the Kai decimated us with a force three times larger than ours had erased that hope with a chilling finality.

  The horror of Denver flashed in my head. Goldman, the lone survivor of a terrible battle between the Kai and the local Home Guard and nearby units at Fort Carson. Theresa Hamedani and her hairy legs, and how I’d playfully shamed her until she demanded I shave them. Caroline Lieska and her ghostly, fine blonde hair. Cherise Tyson’s mirror-smooth, midnight black skin. Grummond and Monohan and Bishara and Hollingsworth and—

  “Halt,” Lowell said, interrupting my runaway thoughts. “Jordan, are you okay to keep going?”

  “Fuck you, Sarge. I ain’t no pussy.”

  “Proper answer, my boy,” Lowell said with a chuckle. “McAdams? Lofgren?”

  I said nothing, but gave a thumbs-up. McAdams did the same.

  “This is probably it for us,” Lowell said, his tone casual, as if explaining we’d be having meatloaf for dinner. “I say we keep running south as long as we can. See if we can get to Boise.”

  “What’s so special about Boise?” Jordan asked.

  “I don’t know. I just don’t want to die in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Good enough for me,” Jordan said. “Let’s just hope my suit wants to see Boise before it dies.”

  “We’ll carry your sorry ass if it doesn’t,” McAdams said.

  I wanted to shout that we most certainly wouldn’t carry him if his suit failed. A Marine without his CR-31 was a dead Marine, especially at this stage of the game. The Kai might be toying with us, but they were shooting to kill, and their insertion of mechs into the game meant they were serious about making sure we were dead. Mech weapons laughed at our fancy energy shields and modern composite armor. I didn’t need to see what the chain gun had done to Kirilenko. I’d seen it a hundred times before.

  “Sarge,” I said, suddenly remembering something important. “Can you detonate Kirilenko’s suit?”

  “Shit,” Lowell said. “Good call, Lofgren.”

  I noticed that he didn’t like to call me “Private” anymore, but like the rest of us, felt foolish about using our lofty, defaulted-through-death titles. We stood still for a minute while he used the Command Link to check her suit’s status.

  “Better avert your eyes,” he said.

  The bright flash tripped the blackout function on my visor. We went down to one knee and waited for the blast wave to roll over us. My suit’s rad counter spiked, making stea
dy chirping noises for fifteen seconds before ratcheting back down to a steady, droning, click-click-click. None of us looked back as we began walking south again, until we reached the top of another rise. We stood there for a moment, our eyes scanning the area, noting the various fires burning across the valley. If the Kai were regrouping, they were doing it far outside of our Tac-Comp sensor range, and we weren’t about to ping the valley below to find out. The four of us turned away and continued on.

  THIRTEEN

  We only had to walk a few more kilometers before we found ourselves in a north-south ravine. An old paved road ran alongside a shallow, fast-moving stream that cut through the miniature valley. The night sky quickly brightened over the mountains to our east, and soon the sun was peeking into the ravine, which widened into a narrow valley after a few more kilometers. I put my mind in automatic mode and tuned out. I spent the hours thinking of nothing, and when that didn’t work, I began to repeat various lyrics until my brain finally shut the fuck up and cooperated. I counted rocks, trees, flowers, how many steps Jordan’s feet took over a one-hour period, and anything else to keep the image of Hollingsworth’s torn body and the ghost of Kirilenko’s atomized remains from haunting me. My stomach began to growl at some point, but I refused to entertain the idea of eating.

  Mostly because the packs attached to my backside had been riddled with plasma rounds. I doubted there was much beyond a few burned scraps of whatever nearly indestructible material the packs were made of. For another hour, I paid only enough attention to my feet to keep them going without snagging a rock, a branch, or anything else that might trip me up. Most of my brain activity focused on performing a check of my suit’s energy shield.

  I had lost or damaged so many of the relays that there might be enough shielding left on my backside to stop two small rounds before it gave out and my armor had to do its job. I knew my armor would protect me for another half-dozen hits, maybe, then I’d be scooping my guts out of the legs of my suit. Jordan’s shield failed after the relays on his chest and arms had been damaged by the mech’s rockets, not that it would have stopped one of the mech’s ballistic rounds.

  My brain began wandering into the why did they use plasma rifles for their infantry, heavy lasers for their tanks, and ballistics for their mechs? territory, which was out of bounds. I cut off the query by sifting through the various maps stored in my Nav-Comp. I had no idea why Sergeant Lowell wanted to go to Boise now any more than I’d been able to figure out why he and Lieutenant Foster had wanted to head toward Seattle after escaping Little Rock and Dallas.

  I decided seeing a familiar location one more time, even if it was a deathtrap (and a graveyard), was something worth going on for. I’d been there often enough growing up that I’d recognize the skyline. It wasn’t Markura, a luxurious city orbiting Cressia-IV. It wasn’t New Mecca, the only city allowed in the entire Farouk system—and one of the most glorious sights I’ve ever witnessed, thanks to Bishara procuring us passes for a twenty-four hour tour. I’d seen landscapes which can barely be described, and alien orbital stations and warships that took my breath away, but none of those places sparked a single flash of emotion. I felt something stir in me as I remembered another time, another life, the days and nights of a familiar place.

  My stomach let out a violent rumble a few klicks before we came to a road sign and a major highway junction. I held it in, forcing myself to suffer. It was something to keep my mind focused on. Daydreaming about roasted chicken, fried eggs and tortillas, and chocolate cake was better than remembering anything that might trick me into feeling. By the time we reached the sign, I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Sarge,” I said as we came to a stop. “Gotta eat something.”

  “Roger that. Let’s back up into the trees.”

  We moved under the leafy canopy. I noticed that Jordan’s suit was having trouble maintaining a stealth pattern. I looked down at my own suit and saw that my right leg was slightly blurry. I reached down and tapped the armor, as if that would correct the problem. Blurry was still better than a rotating pattern of stealth-black-stealth-black. I gave a visual check to Lowell’s and McAdams’ suits. McAdams offered me a protein bar. When I popped my visor and raised my eyebrow at her, she smiled and turned around, gesturing with her hand toward her own back, then turned back and made a poof noise. I grinned and tore into the foil wrapper.

  “Garden Valley to the east,” Lowell said. “Horseshoe Bend then Boise to the south.”

  “What the hell is ‘Horseshoe Bend’?” Jordan asked, looking at me.

  “It’s just a small town, about forty klicks from Boise. There’s nothing between here and there, and there wasn’t much between Horseshoe Bend and Boise the last time I was there.”

  “Then what the hell is a ‘Garden Valley’?”

  “It’s another small city. Never been there. Are we done with the geography quiz?”

  “I guess we’ll keep going south,” Lowell said, interrupting whatever Jordan had been about to say. “Let’s go.”

  ***

  Ten klicks down the road, we ran into a nest of Vipers. Our Tac-Comps were great at detecting and marking potential enemies that were either moving, giving off the right thermal signatures, or emitting certain forms of EM radiation, such as Kai mechs, Vipers, or drones—pretty much any non-organic machine they used. Or in the case of Vipers, semi-organic. The Kai seemed to be learning a bit of strategy by leaving their automatons in hibernation mode. They were practically invisible to us unless we stepped on one, which Sergeant Lowell did.

  The ground around us for twenty meters seemed to boil and come alive all at once. I immediately began to fire bursts in an arc around me, my Tac-Comp frantically painting each Viper as it processed the data. Lowell screamed, but his marker stayed lit. My rifle ran dry and I popped the magazine with a command from my HUD. The reservoir on my right thigh opened its rectangular slot and I jammed the Harper’s grip into it, removing it the instant the icon flashed green in my visor.

  “Cover me!” McAdams yelled.

  Jordan swung around to clear the area to her right, while I tried to keep the area behind us clear as I picked off the Vipers rushing us from the front. She grabbed Lowell by his forearm and began to drag him toward the hillside behind us. Lowell’s left foot was missing, though the blood loss looked minimal after the suit had closed it off. I imagined he’d been pumped full of painkillers and no-shock within seconds, but he did his best to keep up a field of fire as we backed toward the rise behind us.

  McAdams propped him up against a pine trunk halfway up the hill and went to one knee. Jordan did the same, while I took cover behind another trunk and began firing at the incoming Vipers. The monsters had an energy cannon on their rears, but they didn’t seem to be very accurate, which was good, as the rounds did real damage compared to Kai infantry weapons. The real danger with the Vipers was letting them get close enough to use their multiple arms, which were little more than sharp blades, claws, and fingers.

  By the time we put down the last one—none of them making it closer than ten meters thanks to our training, and more than anything, our Tac-Comps—I’d burned almost half of my remaining ammo. I volunteered to walk down the hill and finish off any that might only be wounded. I spent the next twenty minutes hoping one of the fuckers would rise up and gut me, or just pop my helmet and its contents with a well-placed shot. I didn’t get my wish, and returned to the others.

  “Shit, Sarge,” I said, unable to keep my mouth closed when I saw him. “You got fucked up.”

  Sergeant Lowell laughed, then coughed, then did both. His foot was missing, his left thigh looked like it had been torn to shreds, and there were three holes in the stomach area of his suit. I winced, thinking about what the back of his suit must look like.

  “Are you feeling okay?” I asked.

  It was a stupid question, but it made him laugh again.

  “Everything is peachy, Lofgren.” He grinned. “Krista thinks I’m gonna die, but I’ve go
t other plans.”

  “You’re an asshole, Mike,” she said, refusing to look at him.

  “I think she might have a more accurate diagnosis than you,” I said.

  I closed my eyes. Now was not the time to lose it, I told myself. I knew it was coming, and coming fast, but I had to hold it off for just a little while longer. I couldn’t break in front of my CO. I didn’t want to finally walk off the pier in front of McAdams and Jordan. That’s not what friends did. They fell apart when no one else was watching, when no one else could see. When no one else could stop them.

  “She always did think she was smarter than me,” he said, coughing and laughing for a few seconds. “I’m not going anywhere. Not yet. You three are, though. Keep going south. I’ll wait for ‘em to show up and gloat. Maybe they’ll bring a little porta-oven. I don’t think they’ll like my porta-oven.”

  Lowell began to giggle, then punched himself in the thigh, which made him scream.

  “You’re losing it, Mike,” McAdams said, but her voice was soft, full of sorrow.

  They’d been lovers on a regular basis over the years they’d served together. I was glad I hadn’t been that close to anyone other than Theresa, and even then, we’d been casual partners. Lowell and McAdams had been in a smaller pool of potential partners for most of their service, back when the brass was still enforcing the “no sexual contact with anyone outside of your rank” rule. I already felt even more dead inside than I thought possible now that Sergeant Michael Donald Lowell would soon be no more.

  “It’s a stupid game, anyway,” he said.

  “What game?” I asked.

  “Being the last one standing. It’s overrated.”

  “Goddammit, Mike,” McAdams said before breaking down.