Chapter 10 John Wayne #2
Spinning on his heel, Gabriel leveled his empty gun towards the head of the alley. Judd and Phin were running towards them. Gabriel immediately relaxed, jumping off the carcass of his kill.
Phin grabbed Gabriel in a bruising hug. It was brief, but he grabbed Gabriel by the helmet and twisted his face to check for any injuries.
“Can’t believe you popped your cherry before we did,” Judd groused. Blake hoped he meant killing the thing.
Blake was jostled away from the alien so the soldiers could get a better look. Phin had his gun trained on it; his eyes narrowed suspiciously. Tommy pushed past them and grabbed Blake, his thin arms wrapping around him in a big hug. Blake hugged him back. And not one of his usual half assed hugs.
He might have needed the hug more than Tommy.
Judd one handedly dragged a whiteboard into the living room. Perching it against the wall, he uncapped a marker with his teeth, spitting the cap towards Tommy. He yelped when it hit him in the shoulder.
Blake glared at him. “The hell are you doing?”
“Information,” the scout mumbled around the marker. “Now that the gang is back together, we need to establish what we know.”
Blake chewed the jerky Gabriel was sharing with him. They were both sitting on the couch, and with all his gear off, he still took up an inordinate amount of space. His short hair was dark with sweat and there were marks on his forehead from his helmet.
Phin dropped to the floor beside Tommy. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, grabbed his water bottle, and took a swig before offering it to Tommy. The EMT shyly took it, sipping a little before handing it back. Phin glared at him until he drank a little more.
“How can you eat that Tofurkey crap?” he asked, wrinkling his nose at the open bag of vegan jerky in Tommy’s hands.
Tommy narrowed his eyes at him. “How can you eat the flesh of live animals?”
“They’re not alive when I eat them.”
Before that could escalate into a full-blown thing—and knowing this group, it absolutely would—Gabriel cleared his throat and gestured to the whiteboard.
“Elucidate us.”
Judd stared at him. “Huh?”
Blake sniggered. “C’mon teach. Tell us what you know.”
Brushing off the fact that he had just been insulted, Judd began scribbling in purple marker. “Okay, so far, we know there is one ship over Capitol Hill.”
“Last info we had, it was the only one in the United States, but that could change,” Gabriel got up to stand behind the couch, hands braced on the back, one on either side of Blake’s head. “It doesn’t seem to be moving.”
“No, it’s a cheating camping bitch.” Judd’s marker squeaked as he wrote down ‘one (1) spaceship’.
“Just because you get your ass kicked in Nuke Town, doesn’t mean camping is for bitches.” Phin grinned; his teeth very white against his darker skin.
Judd flipped him off without looking away from the board. “Anyway,” he tapped the marker against his lips. “We’ve seen three aliens—the probe, the bi-pedal things, and the fugly dogs.”
“Don’t say probe,” Tommy begged. “Call it a drone.”
Judd smudged probe out with his fingers and replaced it with drone. “What? Afraid of a little back door activity?”
Phin kicked the back of his knee. “Shut up.”
“Children,” Gabriel’s quiet voice cut through the room. “Focus.”
Blake smiled.
Judd drew an angry face next to drones and bipedal. “These are the two with long-range weaponry.”
Tommy looked thoughtful. “The tall ones are almost like handlers.”
The room turned to look at him. He flushed under the sudden attention. “I just mean…we never saw one of the four-legged ones without one, right? And they seemed to take orders from them. Like they’re holding the leash.”
“A command structure.”
“So the fucking ugly dog things are what? Grunts?”
Gabriel nodded. “That makes sense. The two higher ups have weapons.”
Judd underlined drone and erased bipedal to write Handler in its place. “Bipedal is a mouthful.”
“Drones control the Handlers, Handlers control the FUDs.”
Gabriel’s eyebrows rose. “FUDs?”
“Fucking Ugly Dogs,” Phin supplied.
Judd wrote that down and none of them had the energy to argue with him.
“Blake noticed they can’t move and shoot at the same time,” Gabriel pointed out.
The room turned to look at Blake. He picked at a piece of jerky. “It’s probably why the FUDs don’t have guns. The aliens use a type of rail gun—they have to lock down completely to brace for the recoil, which means they can’t move and shoot. They need something faster, more agile to attack.”
Phin’s face dropped and for the first time since Blake had known him, he looked unsure. His gray eyes were distant as he stared at the whiteboard. “Rail guns? The US military has been working on getting a working rail gun for close to half a century.”
Blake couldn’t remember much from the documentary he’d seen over ten years ago, but some stuff stuck. “Right. I’m not intimately familiar with the technology, but I know they require insane amounts of energy.”
“And they destroy themselves,” Phin continued. “Because of the energy issue, the only working models we’ve got have to be attached to massive destroyers. And they chew themselves up with each use.”
“They don’t seem to have that problem,” Gabriel mused, sighing heavily. His breath ghosted across the top of Blake’s head.
“Ok, so they’re smarter than us.” Judd jabbed his marker into the board. “We already knew that. They have spaceships!”
“So do we,” Phin bristled.
“Not really,” Tommy yawned. “We have a space shuttle. There’s a difference.
Have you seen what our shuttle looks like after reentering our atmosphere?
Beat to hell. We can get one exit and one entry—if we’re lucky.
Whatever they have, that ship destroyed one of the US’s biggest cities in less than twenty-four hours, is capable of interstellar travel, and has weaponry we can’t even begin to understand. ”
The room stared at him blankly. Tommy shrank under the attention. “I like space,” he mumbled.
Blake pinched his nose. “Picture it like this: we’re cavemen. While we’re busy rubbing two sticks together to make a fire, they’re the fucking Enterprise.”
That had the desired effect. Everyone was quiet as they contemplated just what that meant.
“Great,” Judd muttered, his drawl extending the final syllable. “Now we’re going to get fucked by Kirk.”
Phin snorted. “Oh, like you wouldn’t love that.”
“Shut it, red shirt.”
Blake sighed as the two grown soldiers started squabbling with each other.
Again. They reminded him of his colleagues.
They could be hosing blood and brains out the back of the ambulance while discussing what they wanted for lunch.
The little arguments were infantile, but they did break the tension.
And when it was time to suit up, they were both as serious as it came. Blake had seen it.
“I don’t understand,” Tommy whispered, ducking his head so he was closer to Blake. “Where is the military?”
“Gabriel said the aliens took out every military installation in Virginia before they even landed.”
“But still,” Tommy’s voice dropped lower, like he didn’t want the soldiers to hear him criticizing. “We have thousands of military bases, weapons silos, and stuff. And that’s not counting the fleet offshore. They destroyed them all?”
“Another thing,” Tommy let his voice travel this time. “They destroyed the power grid, so that’s why we don’t have electricity. But what about radio? There are a billion HAM radio operators out there. Why can’t they get through?”
Blake didn’t have an answer to that.
“Even an EMP pulse would only destroy things inside the pulse. Their radios weren’t here when everything short-circuited. So why aren’t they working?” Tommy asked.
“Stop asking me questions I clearly don’t have the answer to,” Blake snapped, drawing Gabriel’s attention.
“I don’t have the answers either! I’m just saying there’s something else going on. There’s a reason we haven’t launched a full scale attack yet.” Tommy whisper yelled, throwing his hands in the air.
“Either way,” Judd said, tossing the marker to the floor. “We need to establish contact. With permission, I’m going to try and set up the telegraph.”
“I’ll help,” Tommy offered
They disappeared into the Captain’s office to work on this harebrained scheme Blake came up with on a fucking whim. God. They didn’t even know what they were doing. Rubbing his face, he flopped back onto the couch, breathing hard.
Gabriel’s fingers carded through his hair, gently tugging his face out of his hands to look up at him. Looming over him, Gabriel’s smile was faint and reassuring.
“You really saved our asses. Both of you.”
Blake thought back to Tommy’s pale face as they drove through the burning streets and the singed ends of his hair. “Tommy needs to leave. Evacuate or whatever.”
“If we get some communication up and running, we can request a helo. Get all of us out of here.”
“What about your mission?”
Gabriel’s fingers stilled in his hair; nails buried in his scalp in a way that was uncomfortably comfortable. Tiny pinpricks of pain he could lean into. Something flickered across his face.
“Mission is unchanged,” he said gruffly. “Establish communications and perform reconnaissance. Saving civilians is part of my job.”
Blake couldn’t nod, so he just looked up at Gabriel. Even from this angle he was striking. Maybe not in a Hollywood kind of way, but in a calm and competent kind of way. The way he assessed situations allowed his men free rein as long as they came back when he called. Confident and not showy.
Blake liked it.
Admitting that felt like a rubber band snapping in his chest, and the rush of emotions was too much this time. Gabriel was cool and competent, and Blake was barely holding it together.
Saving civilians is part of my job.