Misfire?
Ray Roos glanced at his hand holding the gun and saw it lying on the floor in a puddle of red, detached from his arm at the wrist. He raised the stump and examined it with wide, child-like eyes.
"Well looky here…"
Trevor's sword swung again, sending Roos' head rolling across the red carpet…
…General Tom Prescott followed his aide through the front door of what had been the Long Beach Museum but now served as 2 ^ nd Corp's Signals and Communication station. He had been pulled from a meeting with community leaders by a message from General Bobby Bogart, one time assistant to General Shepherd but now the commanding officer of the Pennsylvania 1 ^ st Armored Division.
Meetings with community leaders were vital, especially now that attitudes toward The Empire, or nation, or whatever they were those days, finally started to show signs of change in California.
This particular meeting with the locals meant to win help in rooting out a handful of hit-and-run bandits sniping check points and harassing convoys. What a pity that meeting went unfinished. Bogart's summons better be good.
Prescott hurried through the building passing tables of electronic equipment some of which linked to portable radar stations along the beach and others to a series of sonar buoys dropped off shore: a sort of makeshift west coast tambourine line.
Bogart-easily identifiable by his big Lebanese nose-waited at the rear of the building near a glass door leading to a beachside patio.
"Pardon my French, but what the heck is it, Bobby?"
Bogart answered in a voice bordering on panicked, "We've got contacts."
Technicians seated at monitoring stations shouted, "Five Hundred Yards and closing," and "Multiple contacts" and "Airborne! Repeat I've got radar contacts in the sky."
Prescott hurried onto the patio with Bogart a step behind. A swift sandy breeze blew across the empty space there.
The General raised a set of field glasses. The hands holding the binoculars trembled.
He saw shapes climbing the horizon and closing on the shore line illuminated by a low-hanging sun. They seemed to be animals of a kind, born from some perverted nightmare. As they neared, they made a sound. A beastly groan from a chorus of damned creatures. Of war machines.
Of Voggoth's children.
"Oh my God…"
…Ashley reached the top of the stairs and stepped through the open doorway to Trevor's old office; the office that would be his once more. Her return to the mansion meant its rebirth. Once again that lakeside estate would become the epicenter of humanity's survival. Once again armies would march to war commanded from that place, led by an Emperor but one more focused, committed, and-yes-more barbaric than ever.
Her husband, she knew, served a mission. Just as she did. But as she slipped inside the office and stepped to the side against the wall, she let the front fall. Ashley leaned there next to the office door and raised a hand over her eyes.
JB hovered just outside the door hearing a sound he had refused to hear before; his mother's cry of loneliness…
…The string unknotted with a gentle pull; the brown wrapper peeled away in strips, leaving Nina holding a small box with a blue lid. No emblem. No markings. Her hands quivered. Payment for her services had finally arrived from Ashley. Feelings rippled through her; an ache in her belly; a hunger in hear heart. The answers came in the form of a photograph and a disc labeled "New Year's Eve."
Her legs wobbled as she eyed the picture. It showed her wearing that black dress she had found hanging in her apartment the day her memories had been stolen.
In the picture, she stood among a row of people: Lori and Jon Brewer as well as Dante Jones, all of whom she knew to have been close friends of Trevor Stone going back to the earliest days of the invasion, maybe longer.
Next to her, with his arm slung around her waist and holding her close, stood Trevor. All of them smiling together. All friends. And yet, the way he held her so close…the way his arm wrapped around her…the look on her face; an expression of happiness so deep and real she nearly did not recognize herself…
…Evan Godfrey stood at the podium waiting for his VIP guests to arrive so that the press conference could begin. He had come outside early with the intension of gaining the media's trust, of taking control of the event. Instead, he felt uncomfortable and vulnerable.
A commotion pulled his eyes from the pages of notes and quotes and background information. The line of reporters seated on folding metal chairs rose to their feet one after another like stadium fans doing the wave all with wide eyes staring beyond Evan.
The President swiveled around.
A man descended upon Evan Godfrey in determined strides. A ragged man dressed in BDU pants and a black shirt carrying some long object in his hands. A man with eyes locked onto Evan's own.
Trevor. Trevor Stone.
The President's shock stymied any defense, any attempt at escape.
The warrior King who had come to reclaim his throne raised the sword with both hands in a clumsy but brutal downward thrust. The metal pierced the double breasted suit dead center and slowly but firmly plunged into Godfrey's sternum and out the other side.
The victim's knees bent forward while his shoulders and body slumped back. The blade finished its blow by firmly lodging in the ground, pinning President Evan Godfrey in a half-standing position; his arms dangling.
He coughed blood once. An insane smile flashed on his lips. His eyes glazed over.
Video tape rolled, cameras flashed, but no reporter spoke in anything other than gasps.
Trevor Stone gazed at Godfrey's corpse for a moment, and then instinctively shot his eyes up toward the roof of the White House. There Dante Jones stood, watching the carnage below with an unhinged jaw and scared eyes.
Trevor turned around and walked back inside…
…It wasn't very big-maybe the size of a small car-but it made a Hell of a noise. A screaming noise, as if it were a wounded animal in horrendous pain. From a distance, it resembled a stained green sheet wrapped around a ball with the ends of that sheet flapping like a kite trapped in a gale. It made Prescott think of a ghost, a specter, some kind of spook.
However, this 'Spook'-about the tenth so far-rose from the mouth of one of the whale-things. The 'Spook' hollered as it swept over the beach before finding a target and diving as if it were a kamikaze pilot, hitting a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and exploding both of them in a burst of fire, sand, and shrapnel.
"Get those tanks on the beach!" Prescott screamed at Bogart through a radio above bursts of automatic fire coming from the rear patio. "We have to hold them on the beach!"
Bobby Bogart's voice replied from a tank cupola, "I've got two more columns coming up. They'll be here in five minutes!"
Bogart's first column of Abrams lined in a row of eight along East Ocean Boulevard. Their main guns fired one after another, slamming into the phalanx of rough-skinned whale-things that served as landing craft, each twenty yards wide and twice as long.
One of the ships suffered a critical hit, listed, and tossed about chaotically on the surf bleeding a type of yellow puss. The others-a hundred of them-continued toward shore stopping periodically to release batches of flying nasties.
Human infantry manned hastily-improvised barricades facing the beach from Ocean Boulevard. Machine guns and light artillery fired toward the Pacific at the mass of ships; or were they monsters?
In reply, one of The Order's own battleships-something like a piece of coral with barrels-launched a bombardment of its own. The big round shells resembled water balloons, spreading a splash of killer acid on men and equipment, mortally wounding both. The disintegrating liquid worked too fast to allow for screams. Prescott saw a dozen of his troops melt away in the blink of an eye.