A New Home Read online

  A New Home

  Osprey Chronicles™ Book Three

  Ramy Vance

  Michael Anderle

  The A New Home Team

  Thanks to our Beta Readers

  Kelly O’Donnell, Larry Omans

  Thanks to the JIT Readers

  Deb Mader

  Dorothy Lloyd

  Peter Manis

  Diane L. Smith

  Zacc Pelter

  Debi Sateren

  If we’ve missed anyone, please let us know!

  Editor

  The Skyhunter Editing Team

  This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2021 by LMBPN Publishing

  Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design

  http://jcalebdesign.com / [email protected]

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  A Michael Anderle Production

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  Version 1.00, September 2021

  ISBN (ebook) 978-1-68500-469-9

  ISBN (paperback) 978-1-68500-470-5

  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

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Author Notes Ramy Vance

  Author Notes Michael Anderle

  Other books by Ramy Vance

  Books By Michael Anderle

  Connect with The Authors

  Chapter One

  Two days before final departure

  A stack of cumulonimbus clouds five miles high had been hanging above the plains for days, flashing and rumbling with threats to unleash hell.

  “Ain’t clouds supposed to, like, move?” Gil asked uneasily.

  Lawrence glanced to his left. Even pressed to the ground on his elbows, Gil was a big guy, the first you’d pick for your team in a football scrimmage. The grizzled Marine made the military-grade binoculars pressed to his face look downright delicate.

  “It ain’t natural.” A cold wind rustled through the dead grasses around them, making Gil shiver. “Them clouds. Staying in one place like that for days. They’re supposed to move. Or break and start to rain. Or do something.”

  Lawrence held out a hand. Gil passed the binoculars, and Lawrence peered down the gently rolling slope to camp.

  Out here, in what used to be the great state of Oklahoma, the land never grew more ambitious than a few rolling hills. Lawrence’s dwindling unit had been closing on this location for two days. Hundreds of kilometers, trekking across long swaths of dead and dying grass, heading straight for a storm wall that hadn’t moved from this point since they’d first sighted it.

  The land rolled down into a long stretch of badlands where even the dead grasses had shriveled up and blown away. A fence ten meters high and topped with loops of barbed wire split the valley neatly in two and stretched endlessly in both directions. On the far side was nothing but cracked earth and tumbleweed beneath a bruise-black sky. On the near side was a slum of pop-up shelters, hacked out of plywood and scraps of corrugated aluminum.

  Figures in dark flowing ponchos prowled between the ramshackle buildings, following hairless dogs tugging at the ends of short leashes. The long rifles the humans carried, combined with the scarlet respirators covering their faces, marked them as Dedicants.

  Lawrence had been afraid of that. Of all the cultish factions that had taken root since the Final Exodus had begun, the Dedicants were the best organized—and most slavishly devoted to their doomsday prophets. Dedicated to what? Dedicated to death. Earth was dying, they preached. Humankind was supposed to die with it. Indeed, humankind, its murderous child, deserved to perish with it.

  Well, maybe. Still, there were a few seats left on the last shuttles leaving Earth and come hell or high water, Lawrence and his unit intended to fill those seats. All that stood between them and the nearest launchpad was sixty kilometers of desert and a mob of suicidal maniacs.

  Lawrence counted at least twelve patrolling man-dog pairs before giving up. He lifted the binoculars to study the perpetual electrical storm roiling overhead. He shrugged. “Weather’s been all weird for years. Something about a fucked-up magnetosphere. Or maybe Sarge was right. Could be some weather experiment escaped from the old facility after they abandoned it.”

  At his mention of the sergeant, Gil shivered again and crossed himself. Lawrence sympathized. There hadn’t been enough left of the older man to bury once the wild synth-dogs had gotten hold of him.

  “Sarge said there would be a gatehouse along the fence here,” Gil said. “Do you see it?”

  Lawrence nibbled his lip and fiddled with the binocular focus. “It must be in that big hut butted right up against the fence. Bet they have people in there, trying to figure out how to hack their way through the security systems.” Probably trying to find ways to send suicide bombers out to the launch pad over the horizon.

  Gil fiddled with the collar of his shirt, which hid his dog tags, and the access chips they bore. “You sure these will work? What if they broke the system?”

  If they don’t work, then we’re never getting past that fence, Lawrence thought. Sarge said anybody who tried to breach that fence without the right access codes would get zapped with enough electricity to fry a battlecruiser.

  Maybe the new genetic mods would protect them from electrocution, but Lawrence didn’t want to find out.

  “I’m pretty sure the system is running fine.” He pointed at a large stake planted in a bare patch of ground at the outskirts of the Dedicant camp. The half-dozen human bodies tied to the pole were blackened lumps topped with skulls. Not even wild synth-dogs had tried to feed off the corpses, and those monsters would eat anything. “Their people aren’t getting through it, either. As long as the system is up and running, our passes will be good.” He managed to inject more confidence into this statement than he felt.

  He turned, kept his body low to the ground, and crawled down the far side of the hill. After a long pause, he heard the rustle of grass as Gil followed.

  They joined Hank at the base of the gentle slope, beneath the shelter of a lone, dying juniper tree. Hank squatted in the dirt beneath the low boughs, fiddling with the guts of an old two-way radio.

  “Anything?” Gil asked.
r />   Hank shook his head. “Same as before. I can pick up occasional broadcasts, but the transmitter is fucked.” The radio blurted faint, meaningless static to punctuate the point. Disgusted, Hank dropped the device. “What did you find?”

  “Seven or eight hundred Dedicants and a good pack of trained synth-dogs,” Lawrence said. “Good news is, they haven’t breached the fence. They’ve only got the gateway guarded and sheltered.”

  “We think,” Gil added.

  Lawrence cast the bigger man a sharp look. “Sarge said there wouldn’t be another entry point for a hundred kilometers in either direction. That’s too far out of the way. If we don’t get through that fence here, we’ll never get to the pickup point in time.”

  There was a click as Hank picked up the radio and snapped the casing back into place. He nodded. “Larry’s right. Two days left before pickup, and it’s a straight line of sixty kilometers to the rendezvous. If we don’t break through here, we're going to miss the boat.”

  Lawrence took a step back as Hank rose to his feet. “So what’s the plan?” He shifted his weight nervously.

  Hank tilted his head from side to side. Blue spider veins popped against flaking patches of his skin. Hank’s mods were taking effect slower than Lawrence's and Gil’s had. A faint cloud followed the man as the top layers of his skin died and flaked away to expose patches of tender, translucent flesh.

  There were many side effects to the genetic modifications. Nobody had bothered to tell the Marine volunteers that vitiligo would be one of them. Every day, Lawrence woke up to find that his companions were a little paler, a little more unrecognizable.

  “We go in.” Hank shrugged.

  “Move fast and hard,” Gil agreed. “Rip a path right through the fuckers and hope that once we get past the facility fence, the auto-defenses will cover our retreat.”

  “Jesus,” Lawrence yelped. “There are hundreds of them. We can outrun the people, sure, but not the dogs.”

  “We can handle a few stinking synth-dogs,” Hank said.

  “That’s what Sarge said,” Lawrence snapped. “He could’ve wiped the floor with your ass, and they still ripped him apart. I can see the scent trail you’re leaving behind. It’s a wonder they haven’t nosed us already.”

  The other two exchanged glances, and Lawrence knew what they were thinking. Little Lady Larry. What a pussy.

  Agitated, he ran his hands through his hair, which had gone long in the months since his last trim. He wanted to take one of his pills, but his supplies were running low, and he had to ration carefully.

  “So what then?” Hank asked. “Do you have a better idea?”

  Lawrence cast his gaze across the dead wood around them, the long-dead grasses. His mind raced. If he let these assholes march through the camp, they’d get ripped apart before they came within a hundred meters of the facility fence, and not only by bullets. Synth-dogs had an unnatural animosity toward other modded organisms.

  A cold wind rattled the dead branches, surrounding them with the nose-tingling scent of rotting juniper berries.

  “Costumes,” Lawrence muttered.

  Hank rolled his eyes and made a quick jerking-off motion. Gil snickered. The big guy had never really bought into the sly jabs the unit had thrown at scrawny, nervous little Larry, but these last few days had changed him, too.

  “Just try it,” Lawrence insisted, ripping a limb from the tree. A shower of dried needles rained around him. “For fuck’s sake. If we can get into the camp before the dogs get a bead on us, they might hesitate to shoot at us for fear of hitting their own.”

  Hank and Gil exchanged long glances. Lightning flashed, and low thunder made the needles shudder.

  Then Hank stripped a cluster of rotting berries from the limb and crushed it beneath his fingers. The wind carried the pungent scent between them, momentarily overwhelming the smell of modded man-flesh.

  “Let’s get a fire going,” Hank relented. “See if we can’t distill some resin cologne.”

  Whether the unmoving storm was the result of the Earth’s long-fucked magnetosphere, an experiment run amok, or some act of a capricious god, it was on their side. As night descended on the Oklahoma panhandle, a knife of lightning split the clouds and sent torrent after torrent of rain pounding over the encampment.

  Good thing the juniper pitch was water-resistant.

  The three Marines, the last survivors of their squad, army-crawled their way through mud, heads bowed against the howling wind.

  A dark shape slid past the corner of Lawrence’s vision. He caught a powerful whiff of charred bone and flesh as they crawled past the pyre of bodies marking the edge of camp. The scent woke a terrible hunger in his gut.

  God, he thought, forcing his mind away from the burnt offerings. If I knew, if I knew going in what it would make of me—if I could go back and do it all over again, would I still sign on the dotted line?

  He didn’t know.

  Ahead of him, Gil froze. Lawrence peered into the darkness and saw the low, sharp figure of a lone synth-dog pacing the edge of the encampment, its nose to the ground, its metal eyes shining like coins in the wavering light.

  The mutant creature lifted its nose to the air and sniffed. A bolt of lightning forked from the sky and vanished over the encampment rooftops. Judging from the unholy blast of thunder that slapped the air, the lightning had struck less than a kilometer away.

  Casually, as if to prove it was unimpressed by all the wrath of God, the dog lowered its nose and tail, turned, and padded into the encampment.

  Gil began to crawl once more.

  Most of the Dedicants had taken shelter against the storm. They’d deserted the narrow, filthy encampment streets.

  Crouched low, the three of them slipped past the first row of ramshackle huts—more shadows flapping in the howling wind.

  They were fifty meters from the gatehouse hut when the steady scream of an airhorn cut through the storm. Magnesium light flared, and a floodlamp mounted to the roof of the hut burst to life, drawing a neat bullseye circle around the Marines. Blinded by the sudden glare, it took a moment for Lawrence’s sight to adjust. He saw shadows, dozens of them, spilling out of nearby huts. The mad barking of dogs rose above the pounding rain.

  Hank caught the first attacker by his flapping poncho and swung, flinging the man like a shot-put into a flood of Dedicants rushing up between rows of ramshackle huts. By the rapid approach of body heat, Lawrence sensed more charging up behind him. He spun, throwing his weight into a swing. He felt a crunch of metal and bone as his fist connected with a respirator and crushed it into the skull beneath it.

  Lawrence had been right. In the chaos, the Dedicants were afraid to fire for fear of hitting their own. Under ordinary circumstances, they shouldn’t have had any trouble subduing three invaders with dogs and shock sticks.

  These were anything but ordinary times, a fact that Hank demonstrated by grabbing a lunging dog by the throat and ripping off its head as easily as plucking a grape from a vine.

  Everything after that was screaming, howling, blood, as the three raging Marines ripped a path of destruction through the camp. By the time they reached the gatehouse door, Lawrence had grown a second skin of mud and blood.

  As Lawrence and Hank, working in tandem, hurled the lunging dogs back into the crowd to hold it at bay, Gil grabbed the handles of the sealed gatehouse door and ripped it off its hinges.

  Lawrence and Hank darted into the gatehouse as Gil spun on his heels, battering back a rush of synth-dogs. One unfortunate creature was halfway over the threshold when Gil jammed the door back into place. It let out a shriek like tearing metal and went limp as the door bisected its spine. Gil kicked it out of the way as he braced himself against the frame.

  “Get this shit figured out,” he bellowed as the mob outside howled and slammed into the door.

  The gatehouse was a single, large open room crammed with rows of busted crates supporting janky computer setups lit by gas lamps. It butted up against
the fence, and since the barrier was all cables and wires, that left the structure exposed to the elements on one side. Rain spat through the room.

  There was a gate built into the fence, big enough to drive a truck through. The metal struts framing the entry glowed faintly yellow. They hissed, crackling as rain spattered across the conductors. The Dedicants had cleared a two-meter radius around the gate. The cultists didn’t respect much, but they respected this.

  “Is that it?” Hank nodded at the glowing opening.

  Lawrence nodded.

  “I can’t hold them forever,” Gil grunted as sections of the nearby wall began to buckle under the press of the mob outside.

  Hank looked at Lawrence and pointed at the gate. “Ladies first.”

  Lawrence huffed. Sarge had said the access codes embedded in their dog tags would get them through the fence…if nobody had changed the security protocols. Judging by the charred skeletons posted outside the camp, those security protocols were not to be fucked with.

  Behind them, rivets popped as the mob ripped off one of the wall panels—making windows of their own.

  “Move your ass, Private Toner!” Hank bellowed.

  Lawrence flipped him the bird, then hurled himself through the opening.