Invasion: Deluge Book 6: (A Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Story) Read online

  INVASION

  Deluge Series

  Book 6

  By

  Kevin Partner

  Mike Kraus

  © 2021 Muonic Press Inc

  www.muonic.com

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  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, without the permission in writing from the author.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

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  Special Thanks

  Special thanks to my awesome beta team, without whom this book wouldn’t be nearly as great.

  Thank you!

  Chapter 1

  Trapped

  It was dark when the fists stopped beating on the door. By that time Buzz, Max, Pope and Yen were all beyond exhaustion. They huddled together against the freezing wind and the driving snow. The drop beyond the edge of the roof beckoned them to end it quickly rather than be torn apart when their pursuers returned.

  “So, what now?” Yen said. “Do we try to make our way down the stairs?”

  Buzz wiped the snow from his face and tried to rub some life into his cheeks. “No point,” he said. “They won’t have gone far. Safer to stay here.”

  “Safer? So we can freeze to death? I don’t see how that’s any better.”

  Max’s head emerged from within his coat, his teeth chattering. “So cold.”

  Buzz squinted in the darkness as the large round shape of Pope lumbered into view. “We might be able to find better shelter among the antennae over there. I’ve found a hollow between two instrument cabinets.”

  “One of us has to stay by the door, in case they come back,” Yen said.

  Buzz shook his head. “No, that would be a death sentence. We stick together.” He hauled himself upright and began to pull at the iron bars they’d ripped from the roof to wedge the door shut.

  “What are you doing?” Yen yelled, getting onto her feet.

  “I say we get inside, out of the wind. Sounds like they’ve gone, and if at least one of us stays awake at any one time, we’ll hear them coming and have time to get outside again.”

  He expected them to argue, but instead Pope and Yen helped him clear the door so it could be pulled open. “Me first,” Pope said, putting one hand on the door handle and holding his weapon in the other. “Give me some light.”

  Yen turned on the flashlight and held it behind Pope’s shoulder.

  “I’m going to open it a crack. If we see or hear anything, be ready to shut it up tight and secure it as fast as possible.”

  They nodded, and Pope gently pulled on the door handle, squinting into the darkness as Yen shone the light into the widening gap. He paused once it was the width of a hand, waiting for the screech of grumbling metal to die away.

  “If they were waiting on the stairs, then they know we’ve opened the door,” he said. But they couldn’t hear any movement and Yen moved the flashlight up and down so Pope could see what was on the other side.

  “Nothing. It’s like they were never here.” He widened the gap and then stuck his head inside, listening for any noise of movement.

  “It could be a t…trap,” Max said, standing at Buzz’s shoulder.

  Pope looked back over his shoulder, “Yeah, it could be, kid. But I don’t figure we’ve got much choice. If we stay out here, we d—”

  A scream splintered the quiet of the room beyond the door and Pope fell forward, hands splaying as the gun fell from his spasming fingers.

  “Ted!” Buzz called, yanking on the special agent’s shoulder, pulling him backward as a blood-soaked arm thrust into the freezing air and a wailing cry went up. Beyond it, answering cries rent the air and they could feel the pounding of feet upon the stairs.

  “Shut the door!” Buzz yelled, allowing Pope to fall to the side as he, Yen and Max pushed the door back and then began shoving the iron bars between the handles and along the ground. Moments later, fists beat upon the other side, roaring in triumph and frustration.

  When this was done, Buzz kneeled beside Pope and pulled him into a sitting position. He could tell the man was dead, even before Yen shone the flashlight on him, revealing a bloody crater ringed by splinters of bone. One blow. That was all it had taken to split Pope’s head apart like a boiled egg.

  “Oh, my God,” Buzz said as the fists thudded against the door and the snow began falling again, turning red at his feet.

  The sun woke Buzz, climbing above the skyscrapers of downtown Chicago. His first thought was to register surprise that he was alive to see it. His second was to check that he was still alive and his third thought was to see if the others had survived.

  Pope’s body lay a few feet away, stiff, blue and half covered by snow. Yen had wrapped Pope’s coat around Max, and she sat with her arm around the boy, looking back at Buzz in the growing morning light.

  “I was just making up my mind to come and poke you,” she said. “I’ve been awake for ages, wondering if it was just me and Max now. Glad to see you’re still with us.”

  “I can’t feel my feet,” Buzz said. “I’ve never been so cold in my life.”

  Yen tentatively wiggled her toes within her boots. “Me neither. You know they’ll be back soon.”

  The pounding had stopped an hour or so after Pope had been murdered, but they now knew that going inside would be instant death for them all.

  “Yeah. Any ideas?” Buzz got stiffly to his feet and brushed the snow from his pants and coat before walking across the roof, stamping as he went. He heard Yen follow him, her boots crunching on the frozen snow.

  Yellow light reflected off the once-proud skyscrapers of Chicago’s downtown district, their tops poking out of the snow below Buzz’s feet. Toward the lake, a mountain of ice spread from horizon to horizon, its relentless progress swallowing everything in its path. Buzz looked up at the looming glacier, listening for its creaking, cracking progress.

  “It was just as well we got here when we did,” Buzz said to the silent figure of Yen. “Another week and this building would be gone.”

  She pointed to a smaller, low
er part of the glacier that ran alongside the Willis Tower. “Could we make it there?”

  “How? It must be two hundred feet, mostly straight down.”

  Yen shrugged. “I don’t know. You two are supposed to be certified geniuses.”

  “If only. But we’d need a very long rope to get down there safely.”

  “What about the cables on the antennas?”

  Buzz shook his head. “We haven’t got any way of cutting them away. I’m sorry, Yen. I’m all out of ideas.”

  “Well, come up with something. But we need to do something about Ted. It’s not right he’s just left there.”

  Buzz sighed, emitting a cloud of steam. He’d never been one to see the point in worrying about the feelings of the dead, but he had nothing else to do so he followed Yen across to where Ted Pope lay as the snow covered his face.

  In the end, there was no alternative other than to cast his body over the side in an equivalent of a burial at sea. They chose the edge of the roof nearest to the door, in case they were surprised by the enemy, as Yen said a prayer followed by a few words over the curled up, frozen body.

  “You didn’t like me, and I didn’t like you,” she said in conclusion. “But you were a good man who stuck to his word and his friends. You deserved better, and I’m sorry we didn’t protect you when you needed us.”

  Yen stepped back, and Buzz walked forward a couple of feet to kneel beside Pope’s body. “I thought you were a knucklehead until I got to know you better. I don’t know what happened between you and Maisie, but I hope you’re with her now.” He put aside what Maisie’s dead husband Dom might think of this. It wasn’t a time for logic, but rather for saying farewell and beginning the process of healing.

  Max watched wordlessly as Yen and Buzz nudged the body toward the edge and, finally, Buzz grabbed one of the iron bars from the door and gave it a final push, sending it over the edge and out of sight.

  “Goodbye, Ted,” he said, sliding the bar back into place. And as he did so, he heard the sound he dreaded.

  “They’re back!” Max called, running across to the door.

  Yen followed him, opening it a crack and listening. “At least as many as before.”

  Together, they wedged it shut again. “We’re out of options,” Yen said. “They’ll get through eventually.”

  “Can’t we climb down?” Max asked, without much hope in his voice.

  Buzz shook his head. “No. How many rounds have we got left?” he added to Yen.

  She stood with her back to the door as fists banged on it again and pulled a clip out of her pocket before ejecting the one in her Beretta and examining it. “One in the chamber, five in this clip, plus the fifteen in the spare.”

  Buzz took longer to check his Glock 19. “I’ve got nine. What about Ted’s?”

  Yen’s face dropped as she examined the dead agent’s Smith & Wesson. “Two. Should have checked his pockets before pushing him over the edge.”

  “So, we’ve got thirty rounds. How many of them are there?” he said, nodding at the door.

  Yen looked back at him impassively. “More than thirty. A lot more.”

  “Maybe we can scare them off,” Max said. “They don’t know we’ve only got a few rounds.”

  Buzz sighed, his breath freezing on his lips almost instantly. “It may come to that. But even if we got down to ground level by some miracle, what’s the chance the truck’s still there?”

  He stood beside Yen, his back to the door as fists banged on the door, cries of rage and frustration echoing in the room behind that thin, hollow metal frame. Why were these—it was hard to think of them as human—desperate people so filled with hatred and hopelessness? Was it some kind of disease? Mass psychosis? Or could it be as simple as hunger? They were being pursued for their supplies, perhaps. Or maybe for their flesh. He shivered, as much at the thought of those pseudo-zombies as with the freezing cold.

  But what right did they have to simply mow them down in a hail of gunfire? Maybe Max was right, and they’d scatter if the three of them mounted a determined enough attack. What then, though? Even if they got out of the building, they’d be trapped in a frozen city, running from a horror that knew the streets better than they did.

  But even that tiny sliver of hope was better than trying to climb down from here.

  “I vote we fight our way out,” Buzz said.

  Yen nodded. Max said nothing, but put his hand out to take Pope’s weapon from the Vietnamese soldier.

  Yen gave it to him. “We will try. Perhaps there are less of them than it seems. Perhaps they will run from us if we are determined enough. But we must conserve ammunition. Max, do not shoot—you only have two rounds. Save those.”

  “For what?” he asked, his voice shaking.

  “You will know. Shall we proceed? I suggest I go in front, followed by Buzz. If we make it to the exit, then we try to outrun them until we can find a defensible place to hide in.”

  Buzz shook his head. “Almost as insane as trying to climb down.”

  “Almost, but not quite,” she said, her brown eyes looking directly into his. And then, without warning, she kissed him full on the lips. “There, I have wanted to do that for a long time.”

  “You have?” Buzz said, utterly bewildered. He fought back the wave of despair that threatened to overwhelm him. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  She shrugged. “It was never the right time. Now, shall we go?”

  He shut his mouth again, feeling the corners of his eyes moistening. Grief came in many forms, he thought, but the most surprising was the loss of a potential future. Especially one you never imagined until that moment.

  He kissed her, enjoying the moment as her lips yielded and her hand curled around the back of his head. And then the thumping on the door got louder, and they were dragged out of that instant and back into a nightmarish reality.

  Buzz nodded, gave a shy smile and held his gun up.

  Yen reached for the last bar holding the door shut and began pulling.

  A roar went up from the room beyond as the enemy realized what was happening and Buzz’s heart hammered against his ribs as he felt terror and rage mixing like the world’s most lethal cocktail. No mercy.

  Yen pulled and the door burst open as they were forced back.

  At least a dozen ragged figures stumbled onto the roof, hands reflexively covering their eyes against the sudden light.

  “Get back!” Yen yelled.

  With a roar, a man—so covered in filth that his skin color couldn’t be guessed at—raised a notched and dented baseball bat above his head and ran at Yen. She felled him with a single shot, but rather than scaring the attackers, this seemed to fill them with renewed rage and they surged forward, others pushing out into the daylight behind them. It was a horde. Buzz knew that they wouldn’t reach even the top of the stairs. There was no hope.

  He pulled the trigger two, three times, his targets dropping, shrieking, to the ground, staining the snow red. It wouldn’t be long now. Suddenly, pitching themselves from the roof didn’t seem such a bad idea. At least it would be quick.

  Behind him, he heard Max yelling, but he ignored the boy as he focused solely on surviving for a few more seconds. Yen stood beside him, picking off those who dared to approach one by one. They were more wary now. They feared her, especially. But they knew her clip would run out soon.

  Then three dropped. Buzz looked across at Yen, but she hadn’t fired a shot.

  Max called out again. “A helicopter!”

  And Buzz turned as more of the shambling figures fell and the survivors turned and ran, fighting amongst themselves to get back inside the shattered door.

  A Seahawk.

  He led them across the roof so the helicopter would land, his heart refusing to slow. He no longer cared that the weapons were now pointing at him.

  Chapter 2

  USS Louisville

  Buzz and the others sheltered among the broadcast antennae as the gray Seahawk landed cau
tiously on the roof of the Willis Tower, the air filling with noise and snow swept up by the rotor blades.

  As the engine eased down a little, the door slid back and a hand waved them forward, two assault rifles still pointing at the open door of the rooftop exit.

  Buzz didn’t hesitate. Whoever they were and whatever their intentions, he was willing to take his chances rather than tackle the monsters lurking in the dark beyond the gaping portal.

  He grabbed Max’s hand and they ran from shelter, Yen on the boy’s other side until they were able to clamber into the cabin of the helicopter.

  The crewman who’d been beckoning at them called to the pilot and the engines spun up again. Within seconds, they were in the air, flying away from the glacier and the roof. Buzz looked through the window to see dark figures emerging nervously and watching them, impotently shaking their fists in rage and grief.

  He took a foil blanket from one of the crewmen and wrapped it around himself, suddenly aware that he was shaking.

  “You okay?” he said to Max. The boy’s face was white with hints of blue in his lips, so Buzz pulled the foil tighter around his shoulders.

  “Have you got anything for hypothermia?” he said to the crewman who’d finished helping Yen get wrapped up.

  The man—no more than twenty himself, Buzz estimated—said, “I’ll get some blankets, but there’s not much we can do until we get back to the Louisville.”

  “We’re going to Kentucky? He needs treatment!”

  “Sorry, sir, no. We’re from the USS Louisville. She’s around fifty nautical from here. Hang in there for a little longer.”

  The crewman turned away, but Buzz grabbed his arm. “Who sent you? How did you know we were there?”

  “Can’t say, sir. My orders came from Commander Myers. You’d best ask him.”

  Buzz watched the young man returning to his seat and tried to stop himself shivering uncontrollably. He was glad to be off that rooftop, but knew they were now at the mercy of other motivations they couldn’t yet guess.