They spent the night in what had been a power plant. A careful search of the building turned up a room with more than a dozen pods in it. Or what had been pods, since the Grims or Menials had already been “born,” and had left their cocoons to rot. The stench was horrible, but fortunately the power plant was large enough that the group could camp some distance away.
They had a long and mostly sleepless night, illuminated by the full moon and the faint glow off to the east that signaled the presence of a Chimeran base. At first the city was quiet, but it wasn’t long before a mournful howl was heard, and answered from miles away. Voss was on the roof at the time and felt a chill run down his spine.
“What the hell was that?” the soldier standing next to him wanted to know. He’d seen a variety of Chimera, but the long, drawn-out cry was new to him.
“That was a Howler,” Voss answered grimly. “Or, to be more accurate, two Howlers. If you haven’t run into one of them, they’re big, about the size of a lion, and fast. But that isn’t the worst of it. Once they pick up your scent they’ll follow it anywhere.”
The soldier, a kid named Hostler, was armed with a Bellock grenade launcher. It was pointed up at the night sky. His teeth were white in the moonlight. “Maybe so, sir! But if them Howlers come after us I have the answer right here.”
Voss recognized the bravado for what it was, and was about to say something cautionary, when he was distracted by the distant pop, pop, pop of gunfire. Chimera hunting humans? Humans defending themselves? Or humans fighting humans? Anything was possible.
A necklace of five Patrol Drones sped by the building about an hour later, seemingly intent on an errand of some sort, as their lights slid down the street. But to Voss’s relief the humans remained undiscovered.
After what seemed like an eternity the first hint of dawn appeared in the east and, having already broken camp an hour earlier, the presidential party filed out onto the street. They were too heavily burdened to run, but Kawecki insisted on a fast walk.
Malikov, Aklin, Shaw, and the rest of them had no complaints, however. They knew how important it was to put the city behind them as quickly as possible. Route 7 was thick with wrecks. That forced the party to thread their way through the maze, constantly on the lookout for a variety of potential threats.
Perhaps it was the early hour, or maybe it was dumb luck, but for whatever reason, Voss and the rest of the group were able to successively make their way through the downtown area and onto the stretch of road called South Arkansas Avenue.
Then it was time to cross the Arkansas River to the town of Dardanelle. The bridge had been hit from above and there wasn’t much left of it. But although it would have been impossible to drive a car across the bridge, a couple of remaining beams offered a precarious path over the river. At one point Voss paused to look down, saw that at least half a dozen Furies were patrolling the water below, and knew that a fall would mean certain death.
The others recognized the danger as well and were careful to maintain their balance as they completed the crossing and followed Route 7 through Dardanelle’s empty streets. Having reached the town undetected, Voss felt a tremendous sense of relief. The decision to cut through Russellville had paid off.
So as the group left the south end of Dardanelle for the relatively open countryside beyond, the President was in good spirits. But that changed when the party came across a convoy of shot-up Army trucks, a burned-out half-track, and a cluster of improvised crosses. And the farther they went, the worse the carnage became.
As the group topped a hill, a vast field of bones appeared. Thousands upon thousands of bones, some lying on the surface, the rest partially protruding from the dirt as if trying to bury themselves.
Were they human? Yes, they were, Voss concluded, as he and his companions made their way down into the dip beyond. And Chimeran? Yes, judging from the six-eyed skull that stared at him from a few yards away, and the enormous Titan-sized thigh bone sticking up out of the soil.
And there were machines, too. Or what had been machines. Their metal skeletons stood here and there like pieces of abstract sculpture, each carcass marking a moment in what must have been a desperate battle. As Voss followed Kawecki around the remains of a Jeep, he could see a downed VTOL that half blocked the highway. It was riddled with holes and one engine was missing. In the cockpit was a picture of a pretty blonde just below the cockpit, marked with the name “Vera.”
Off to the left, a burned-out tank could be seen with its cannon pointed impotently at the sky. And a couple of hundred yards down the road they came across the shattered remnants of a Chimeran Stalker. One of its four legs had been blown off and it lay slumped to one side.
Had that been the totality of the evidence, Voss might have been able to convince himself that the battle had been a draw. But the truth lay up ahead. That was where the burned-out remains of a Protection Camp could be seen. And there, lying like the remains of a huge tree, were three sections of what had been a heavily armed defense column.
It looked as if the tower had been sheared off about fifty feet above the ground, then fallen across a section of the camp it was supposed to protect, and shattered into three pieces. It was possible that the stinks had a ground weapon capable of such a thing, but Voss was inclined to believe that the column had been attacked from orbit. Aklin was standing next to him. Her face was pale and a tear was trickling down her left cheek. “They fought! They fought hard.”
“Yes,” Voss replied soberly. “Now it’s our turn. Come on. I want to clear the battlefield before sundown.”
But it wasn’t to be. There was no straight path through the maze, and the battlefield occupied at least five square miles of wreck-strewn land. As the sun dropped into the west, the group had to either make camp or travel during the hours of darkness. Something that both Voss and Kawecki opposed.
It wasn’t sufficient to simply make camp, however. Not in the open. The prudent thing to do was to find a spot that could be fortified in a short period of time, using the minimum amount of effort. Kawecki considered a number of different possibilities before eventually settling on a rise crowned by the remains of a small house. It appeared as if the structure had been hit by an artillery shell and burned. Subsequent to that a tank or a Stalker had flattened what remained of the dwelling, scattering scorched lumber all around.
The added elevation, and the presence of a well and a nearly intact stone foundation, made for a good start. But to make the camp even more secure, Kawecki ordered his men to create a 360-degree free-fire zone by clearing away any piece of debris large enough for a stink to hide behind.
Then the soldiers were given orders to prepare firing positions at regular intervals around the perimeter. Finally, once the work was done, they posted sentries and then gathered around small fires. Any blaze could attract the wrong sort of attention, but Kawecki thought that the practical as well as psychological benefits were worth the risk, and Voss agreed.
So it wasn’t long before people were getting water from the squeaky hand pump, heating rations over one of three fires, and preparing for bed. It was dark by then, and the stars were out, as Voss made the rounds with a mug of coffee clutched in his hand. The idea was to keep people’s spirits up, give them a chance to gripe if they wanted to, and get to know them better.
That was what he had in mind as he sat down next to Monica Shaw and asked how she was doing. It was something he had been meaning to do for days. Everybody knew what she had done, so the technician had been something of a pariah, and she looked surprised when Voss spoke to her.