X didn’t respond. He pulled his oar through the water, staying in rhythm with the other three oarsmen.
“You already met Luke, Ricardo, and Wendig,” Rhino said. He stood in the center of the boat and moved from man to man, yelling something in Spanish.
“¡Mas rápido, Barracudas!”
Now he knew what the toothy fish symbol on their armor represented.
“The only team I’ll ever be is Team Raptor,” X muttered under his breath.
The men pulled harder on the oars, upping the tempo. There was a motor on the back, but X guessed they were either conserving gasoline or trying not to make noise.
X was on the fourth oar and was barely keeping up with the others. Water leaked around the patchwork of repairs on the wooden hull and was already sloshing around his ankles.
“Faster, Immortal,” Rhino said.
X pulled harder while keeping his boot on the biggest leak.
A wave slammed the side of the boat, splashing more inside. Rhino yelled again to row faster.
He wasn’t the only one. An army of Cazadores stormed the beaches of the old-world coastal city, yelling at the top of their lungs, each eager to claim the first kill and add a Siren skull to his armor.
But oddly, they kept their rifles and handguns slung or holstered and advanced toward the city with spears and swords out.
They were either crazy or trying to conserve ammunition, X decided. Probably both. What sane person would come out here to hunt for the mutant humans? Especially in this area. A check of his HUD showed the radiation still in the red.
X had spent his ten years on the surface trying to avoid the monsters, but when he did find them, it usually meant there was an Industrial Tech Corporation facility nearby. And, of course, that was where the real loot was. All his life, the end-of-the-world facilities had kept him, and everyone else in the sky, alive with their supplies.
He wondered whether raiding an ITC facility was another part of this mission. Or were they really here just to kill and capture Sirens?
No matter, he would soon find out.
The Barracudas were the last to the beach. Fuego and Whale clambered over the bow and stood guard while the others jumped onto the sand.
Wendig, Luke, and Ricardo grabbed rope handles on the side of the boat, and X helped them drag the vessel up.
He followed the team up the beach, his boots sinking in the wet sand. Rhino, with his shield still over his back, took point, carrying a long spear with a sawtooth head on either end.
He stopped while the other Barracudas gathered behind him. Then he pulled from his duty belt a black bar that looked like soap, and rubbed it over the spearheads. After placing the bar back in the pouch, he pulled out a lighter and lit the blades, creating metal torches that he twirled once, then twice.
He then pulled his shield from his back, and with the shield in one hand and the flaming spear in the other, he set off. Wendig, Luke, and Ricardo moved out with their single-headed spears, but X kept his shortened spear slung over his shoulder and unsheathed his sword.
They moved up the beach, away from the lighthouse still blinking in the distance and attracting the Sirens like bugs to light. In the past, X would have taken out his battery unit to avoid them, but not today. He was with a small army now, and he needed the battery to power his suit and night-vision goggles.
In the green hue, he scanned the remains of yet another postapocalyptic city. This place had probably been a tourist destination at one point, attracting people to its sunny beaches and tiki bars.
Now it was just another wasteland. The largest tower, once standing at least thirty stories, had broken in half, its top falling and crushing two other buildings. Scree surrounded the impact zone.
Some of the buildings, with their exteriors and foundations intact, looked much as they may have looked 260 years ago. But there wasn’t much left of the old-world vehicles that stood rusting with their tires rotted out, windows gone, and interiors nothing but dust and metal bones.
Several Cazador teams were already thronging the first of the roads, heading into the city of brown and gray structures. Vines blocked their route, stretching across the cracked and crumbling asphalt roads. The first of the men hacked through the foliage to clear a path for the bulk of the army.
The Barracudas continued up the beach. A sunken boat ramp led away from the sand to a sagging concrete retaining wall.
Most of the Cazador warriors had taken the ramp, but Rhino selected a different route. He jogged toward a stone stairway, with several broken steps and a twisted handrail, that led up a hill.
Thick tropical trees towered overhead, their red fronds swaying in the breeze. Red pulp from what looked like bite marks oozed down the bark.
It seemed the Sirens had eaten every moving thing. X didn’t see so much as a cockroach. As he set off into the dense vegetation, the first gunshot sounded. Rhino held up a fist, and the Barracudas stopped in the radioactive dirt to look to the east.
The vantage gave them a view of the city, and the army moving through the streets and around broken-down buildings. Another gunshot cracked, and a Siren rose above the sunken roof of a rectangular building, a Cazador warrior hanging from its talons. The man struggled in its grip, firing a handgun at the creature.
It finally dropped him from two hundred feet, and he plummeted back to the surface, his armor and bones crunching audibly on the pavement of a vine-infested road.
The noise brought back to X the painful memory of losing his best friend and Michael’s father, Aaron. And just as before, the female Sirens nesting in the buildings darted out and descended on the dead man, tearing him into manageable pieces before skittering away with meals for their young.
The soldiers on point made it to the street a moment later and charged with their spears, spilling Siren blood on the asphalt. One of the Cazadores skewered a female and hoisted the body into the air—the first trophy.
“And so it begins,” X said.
Rhino twirled his flaming spear and set off down the other the side of the hill. “The rest of the Barracudas don’t think you will live out the day, Immortal,” he called out, “but I give you at least two.”
His bellowing laugh crackled from his breathing apparatus.
“Try ten years, asshole,” X muttered.
The other soldiers moved past him, Wendig reaching out and shoving X so hard he hit the dirt.
“Puto,” Wendig said, looking over his shoulder.
X pushed himself up and grabbed his sword from the dirt. When he rose to his feet, he saw the flashing lighthouse where the Sirens circled, their huge wings beating the air audibly as they flapped around the structure.
“¡Vámonos!” Rhino shouted. Ricardo, Fuego, and Whale vanished over the north side of the hill, and Wendig and Luke double-timed it to catch up.
In the streets to the east, the army of Cazadores battled the Siren hordes. It took only a few minutes for the monsters to grow in number from a few dozen to hundreds, filling the streets with flesh the color of corpses.
The beasts had been busy here over the past two and a half centuries, breeding and growing in numbers. Even children joined the horde, anxious for fresh meat.
X jogged after the other men, suddenly realizing the Barracudas weren’t going on the same mission as the rest of the army. The warriors in the city, fueled by the promise of trophies, prestige, and perhaps a wife, were a decoy to keep the beasts away from Rhino’s small unit.
Their mission was something else entirely.
An electronic wail rang out from the west, and X brought up his sword as three of the eyeless monsters scrambled over the edge and bolted out across the hilltop toward Wendig and Luke.
A shout came in Spanish, but X was too busy throwing his sword to see where it came from. The blade sailed past Wendig and struck the front Siren, knocking it off its feet.