“Come and get it, you cocksuckers.” He put the rifle to his shoulder and took aim.
Gunfire ripped along the ground and the man he was aiming at danced and twitched and screamed as the rounds tore the life from him. Then the men with him spun and raised their weapons. Not toward Bunny, but up. But a hail of bullets tore them down and they fell like dolls. It was only then that Bunny heard the sound of the heavy rotors as a wave of National Guard helicopters came sweeping over the camp.
Top knelt there and watched the militiamen scatter and run and try to hide and try to fight. And die. M134 Miniguns roared, their six rotating barrels spitting thousands of rounds, tearing apart any hope of cover, ripping through body armor. Missiles streaked like falling stars through the night and lifted escaping vehicles high on plumes of fire.
Suddenly the whole landscape was swarming with soldiers, their guns chewing up the fleeing truckers. Armored Humvees leapt over the crests and slammed down, jouncing and then accelerating as their gunners opened up with heavy machine guns. Top smiled despite his pain and weariness. The militiamen had trained for war, had dared to wage it against their own country, and were now learning what it meant to fight that kind of war, against that kind of foe. How Mr. Church had managed it was beyond him. It didn’t even matter. The cavalry had arrived.
He closed his eyes and bent over Tracy Cole, begging her, willing her to keep breathing. Then he threw back his head and in his leather-throated sergeant’s voice roared for a medic.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FORTY-FIVE
When I woke up the first thing I realized was that I wasn’t dead.
“God,” I breathed.
Then I realized that I was in the chamber by the vent. The heat was incredible. I rolled over onto my hands and knees and then pushed off, raising the ten trillion tons of me onto my feet. The room swayed, or I swayed, or the world swayed. All the same to me. I put a hand out to steady myself on the God Machine.
And fell over because there was no God Machine. It was gone. Totally and completely gone. I scrambled back to my feet and looked right and left, trying to reorient myself, but I was in the right place. It was the machine that had gone.
So, too, had the tunnels. The walls had dropped like curtains and solidified into place. Which sounds as impossible as it looked.
The men I’d killed lay where they’d fallen. My gun was there, too, and I bent to pick it up.
I saw a figure in the shadows a few feet away and walked over to it. Valen Oruraka lay there. Ancient, wizened, dried out as if he had lived a long, hard, bad life and withered into a mummy. I knew it was him because of the knife cuts all over him.
Beneath my feet the Yellowstone supervolcano grumbled. Once. Like a giant turning over in his sleep. That one rumble, and then nothing.
Nothing at all.
EPILOGUE
So, yeah, they found me.
Stairs were gone, radio reception was for shit, but they knew where to look. National Guardsmen rappelled down and got me out. They asked a whole lot of questions for which I had no answers that made sense to anyone.
When I got upstairs I didn’t find any of Echo Team. Not one. Not even Ghost. My heart started to break and I think what’s left of my mind wanted to snap. Then a colonel was there, coming at me, pushing me down onto an equipment case, pushing a cup of coffee into my hands.
“How many?” I asked through the blackness in my mind.
“All of them,” he said. “All of them are alive.”
I dropped the coffee, put my face in my hands, and wept.
“Alive” is a relative term. It is often coupled with “well.” Not this time.
I sat vigil in another hospital.
Tracy Cole and Pete Smith circled the drain for a long time. Circled and circled, as surgeons worked. I know surgeons get a lot of flak for being hotshots and egotists. Not from me. They are heroes in their own way. They worked all through the night and into the next day.
Tracy Cole lost part of her lung and a lot of useful bone and tissue. Pete Smith lost his spleen. Neither of them were going to walk through the valley of the shadow with us anymore. But the shadows wouldn’t own them, either. They were on this side of the dirt, and we all have to put that in the win column.
Duffy had nine broken ribs and a cracked sternum, all from bullets that hit him but didn’t penetrate his body armor. The company that made that armor made him a seven-figure offer to be their spokesman. He told them to stick the offer where the sun won’t shine. He told me that he’ll be back.
Same with Tate. Concussion, seventy-three stitches, and some burns. He looks like Frankenstein, but he doesn’t care.
Top took two bullets in the belly. Both were oddball ricochets that hit the lava rock and bounced up under his body armor. They cut him, but the angle was in his favor and both rounds lodged in the plate steel he calls an abdomen. He’s already walking around and telling the hospital staff how to do their business. Bunny, on the other hand, had a through-and-through of the thigh. Took a lot of meat with it, but missed the bone and it missed the arteries. His fianc ée, Lydia Ruiz, flew out from San Diego and was alternately giving him hell and giving him kisses.
That left me.
I had a bunch of cuts on my body I couldn’t explain. I had some burns and I had a moderately nasty skull fracture. They shaved my head, did some weird shit to me, and told me not to drink any booze for a month.
Yeah, we’ll see how that plays out.
Ghost had a rough time of it. His Kevlar saved him from bullet wounds, but the incoming rounds had kicked up a spray of jagged stone chips. The doctors removed eleven of them and put in forty-seven stitches. There was some muscle damage, and he would need rest and rehab and lots of TLC. Which he would get. He was already milking it with the practiced ease of a professional scam artist.
Aliens.
Junie came and sat by my bedside, and we talked. Doc Holliday called me twenty times a day, and we talked. Rudy was there, and we talked.
Aliens.
Where do you go with that?
Were they gone? Why were they ever here in the first place? Would we ever really know the meaning of it all?
A lot of Junie’s friends in the conspiracy community have always had a lot of answers. Or, theories. Some of them are dingbat nonsense. But some make a lot more sense to me than they did before. When Junie talks about these things, when she plays video interviews with people claiming to be experiencers, with people claiming to be channels for alien beings, I don’t laugh or turn away or dismiss it out of hand.
And, weirdly, unexpectedly, it’s brought us closer. The truth of what’s in her DNA and what I saw firsthand has burned away a lot of ephemeral relationship angst and bullshit. Sometimes at night, when I think about the scaly monsters on the hill in that other world, I give them a nod of thanks.
Does that make me a little crazy? Ha. That ship sailed a long, long time ago.
Mr. Church came out to see me. We sat in the garden of the hospital, drinking coffee and eating cookies.
I told him everything, and he listened without comment. When I was finished he took off his tinted glasses and rubbed his eyes and nodded. He didn’t say a thing about what I told him.
Instead, he told me about what the rest of the DMS had been doing while Echo Team was being put back together.
Bug and his team used MindReader Q1 to hack their way through Gadyuka’s laptops, which had been obtained by Lilith. Tracing e-mails to servers and decrypting the hell out of all of it gave them the names of everyone involved in the New Soviet. This data was offered to the president and top officials in the State Department, but there has been no response at all.