“Fire in the hole!” Bly warned.
Nina walked backwards to watch the show. She whispered an imitation of a howl that might just come from the wolf’s head with ruby eyes patched on her shoulder.
“Aaaawwooooo…”
The canisters exploded turning the remaining vehicles into fireballs. A horrible screeching sound came from the transport hauling Voggoth’s seeds. The second vehicle ripped apart as its contents caught fire and detonated. Smoke from the burning convoy rose a thousand feet into the morning sky, mixing black soot with gray cloud…
The Dark Wolves found a garage with several four-wheel all-terrain vehicles and siphoned gas from nearby cars. They used a couple of towed wooden carts to carry the three elkhounds that comprised the non-human contingent of their SpecOps team and equipment.
They traveled northeast for the first part of the day along a route that, according to Vince Caesar, followed the Santa Fe trail of Old West days.
In order to avoid the searching eyes of a flying Chariot the team hid in a farm house’s tornado cellar for an hour, taking that time to have an early lunch of tinned rations and dried meat. Later that afternoon a column of Voggoth’s monks backed by Spider Sentries blocked Route 50 around Spearville.
Nina, in response, moved her unit south and across a stretch of fields and rolling hills. They made slow progress and, due to several more Chariots scouring the area, abandoned their vehicles and moved on foot, lugging their equipment on their backs.
Just before sunset the Dark Wolves sheltered inside the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church at Windhorst. Nina spied a keystone dated May 4, 1912 and marveled at how the magnificent stone and brick building had survived not only time, but Armageddon, The Empire, and now Voggoth’s great march east seemingly without a scratch.
A little before midnight the K9s raised the alarm as a group of five human refugees sought shelter in the church, too. Nina noted that they were escaping west, not east. When the refugees told them why, Nina knew she had found their next target and hurriedly rigged a transmitter to contact air command…
Nina stood in a patch of warped, dying woods and watched the target through binoculars. It sat in the center of what had once been nine holes of fairways and sand traps. But now the greens of the Kinsley Country Club were cracked and brown not merely from negligence, but from the infection of Voggoth’s machines.
Most of the sky above remained blue, but overhead of the large structure at the middle of the club’s grounds a thunderhead of black churned to life.
The Order’s building stood 30 feet high and covered an area of 50 square yards. To Nina’s eye, it resembled a bronze and black snow globe held in a greenish base lined with bony ribs and covered in strands of yellow like a fishnet.
Cords slithered away from the centerpiece in a circular pattern resembling roots from a diseased tree. Rows of white fungi-like growths bubbled out from those roots, pulsating as if the sacs breathed, although Nina knew that to be a hideous irony.
She counted hundreds of Voggoth’s offspring squirming and growing across this farm. The entire field smelled of decay. Flies swarmed like deranged bees trying to pollinate the dead.
As she viewed those incubators she saw not only artificial flesh and gore but materials resembling iron and steeclass="underline" a stark reminder that the biology of The Order’s machines defied any attempt to classify it as natural or alive.
Using her field glasses, Nina surveyed a pair of domes planted in the ground just outside the ring of growths. She knew these to be guardians that would rise up to face any ground threat. Further off, a tree-like dispenser unit sat ready to launch Spider Sentries at the first alarm.
None of those defenses mattered to Captain Forest because she saw the opportunity to truly hurt The Order. In a few days this farm would hatch Ogres and maybe artillery platform components, and perhaps worse.
Nina dropped her binoculars, glanced down to her left at Vince Caesar and pointed forward. Vince knelt behind a small camera-like device mounted on short tripod legs. He put his eye to the lens and followed his Captain’s direction. Coded pulses of laser light shot out from the targeting device and bounced off the big ball at the center of the farm.
Nina spoke into a transmitter, “Angel Eyes, this is Wolf. We have painted the target…”
Five miles back and high in the sky an F-15 barrel-rolled as it descended through a layer of misty-white clouds. The bombs beneath its wings glinted in the sun for a moment before the craft leveled and steadied course.
The female pilot waited for a target lock indication from the onboard LANTIRN system. When she heard that tone, she released a set of PAVEWAY II precision-guided bombs from weapons pods beneath the wings. The smart bombs glided away with their guidance systems locked on to the laser signal…
Nina dropped to the ground for cover as she saw the bombs fall at their target, which they hit perfectly. The center of The Order’s farm disintegrated in an explosion that began in golden flames and morphed into a cloud of brown and black. The thunderclap of the strike reverberated across the country club grounds and to the surrounding Kansas plains. The impact tremor caused a gray, dead tree not far from Nina’s position to crash over.
As the remaining pieces of the main structure collapsed into a pile, the buds on the tendrils bulged and rocked as if something trapped within tried to escape the embryos. Muffled cries-some animal-like, others closer to mechanical whirs-called from the field of dead.
Nina brought the binoculars to her eyes and delighted in the death throes of Voggoth’s children.
A shower of soil and biomass fell over the wasteland as the explosion faded. As Nina watched, she spied something amazing. There-surrounded by the brown earth and sickly tendrils of the dying farm-a bachelor’s button with its blue, starburst-like flower stubbornly refusing to yield its piece of land despite the encroachment of The Order’s sinister vines to either side.
A kernel of life surviving in the midst of death incarnate.
The roar of the F-15 swooping low to survey its handiwork drew Nina’s eyes to the sky. The plane’s wings rocked quick in a secret salute to its spotters and then banked hard and climbed. Nina saw missiles under its wings-the cockpit-the pilot steering her aircraft…
“You guys need a little help down there?”
Nina radioed Jon Brewer who responded, “Damn straight, Ghost Rider. Tear em’ up!”
Trevor sat in the forward seat controlling the gunship’s armaments. Gunner and pilot both wore night vision goggles.
Nina swerved the ship around searching for targets.
“Hold.”
She responded to Trevor’s order and held the craft steady.
The rapid-fire cannon whirled and bullets flew. Two enemy soldiers and the parked car they hid behind shredded to pieces.
“Starboard! Starboard!”
Trevor turned the gun sights to his right at Nina’s warning. A trio of Redcoats stood inside the windows of the electronics outlet, apparently thinking the darkness provided cover.
The ‘copter’s gun fired again. Glass smashed, parts of the store’s ceiling fell, and the aliens broke apart…
The F-15 fired its afterburners and sped east hurrying to return to friendly skies.
“Nina! Captain!”
“What? Huh?”
Nina shook away her trance and saw Vince packing up his targeting gear.
“I said, Voggoth’s boys are getting agitated over there. We should bug out before they figure the bomber must’ve had a spotter.”
“Yeah. Okay, um, yeah,” she regained her composure. “Move out to the south then hook east. Move it!”
Nina and her team withdrew from the Kinsley Country Club without incident, moving a mile south before following Country Road 30 east for about five miles. There they stumbled upon a dented but still working Dodge Ram with a cab on the back. Two badly-picked at corpses lay on the road alongside the truck, including one with a hunting rifle in his or her hand.