Last Defense Page 3

  “What’ve we got?” Noto asks.

  “Looks like a transport chopper.” The agent hands her binoculars to Noto. “Army markings.”

  “Do we know who they are?” I ask. Despite the agents helping us out in Ashwood, the government isn’t exactly to be trusted right now. I try to remember what I’ve read on They Walk Among Us and everything else we’ve uncovered, hoping to recall exactly who in the army we can trust, if anyone.

  “We’re on walkie-talkies here, and most of the cell networks are down,” Noto mutters. “Unless you saw some kind of broadcasting equipment underground, we can’t exactly call them up. Stay in the house until we’ve identified them.” He unholsters his sidearm. “And tell the other in there to prep the big guns.”

  Gamera lets out a growl. Overhead, the remaining Chimærae continue to dart around in avian forms, squawking.

  “I’ll be right inside,” I say. “If anything goes wrong . . .”

  But I’m not sure how to finish that sentence. Noto just jerks his head towards the door, and without knowing what else to do, I go. When I get inside, I pull open two slats of wooden blinds and watch as the chopper lands on the street in front of the house.

  Two men dressed in black body armor hop off the helicopter when it lands. The one in front keeps his sidearm holstered, but the FBI agents have their weapons on him, their posture rigid. The other man’s got some kind of assault rifle slung across his back and a crew cut. He looks like he’s made of nothing but muscle, like a pro wrestler.

  I can see mouths moving but can’t hear anything over the noise of the helicopter’s blades beating. Noto steps forward, holding out what I assume is his badge. He talks to the two men for a bit and then raises a hand to the agents behind him. They relax slightly.

  Then Noto turns his face to the window I’m looking out of. The others follow suit, until they’re all staring in my direction.

  “Oh, no . . . ,” I murmur.

  The men in body armor follow Noto across the lawn. Gamera hisses, jumping to the ground in front of me.

  “Easy there,” I say softly, watching the men approach. “I think we’re okay.”

  Once inside the house, Noto introduces the man who seems to be in charge as Colonel Lujan. His handshake is firm, and his eyes dark and piercing beneath bushy black eyebrows. The other man goes unnamed, but “Briggs” is written on a patch over the chest pocket of his uniform.

  “I’m Malcolm Goode,” I say. Lujan and his other man just nod, as if I’m giving them information they already had. Neither of them moves to sit or enter past the foyer.

  “Dr. Goode,” Lujan says. “I’ll cut to the chase: our country is under siege and facing an alien invasion. The president and several other key members of the administration have been transported to a bunker, where they’re formulating America’s response to this crisis. Your assistance has been requested.”

  “My assistance?” I ask.

  “It seems that Walker’s been in touch with the brass,” Noto says. “They want answers as to what’s going on, and she gave them your name. Said you could provide a clear picture of the conflict. Apparently she’s tied up in New York with . . . well, you saw what’s going on there.”

  “My son. Did she mention Sam?”

  “I haven’t spoken to Agent Walker directly,” Lujan says. “I’m just here to make sure your collection goes smoothly. As you can imagine, time is a factor here, Dr. Goode.”

  My mind races, wondering if I even have the option of saying no to these men. And there’s still the possibility that something from the archives could help—however unlikely that might seem considering the news.

  On the other hand, I can almost certainly do more good if I have the president’s ear and can lay out exactly what’s happening. Doing that will help Sam and the others.

  “If you’ll give me a few minutes, I’d like to pack up some of my things from underground. My rifle is down there, along with a lot of intel I’d—”

  “We can arm you,” Lujan says.

  “I can keep things going here,” Noto says. “If your son or any of the others return . . .” He pauses. “Well, it seems like Walker knows how to get in contact with the bunker.”

  “But—”

  “With all due respect, sir,” the colonel says, “we need to move.”

  I look back and forth between them before nodding. Gamera shifts on the ground between my feet.

  “My bag and jacket are in the dining room,” I say, darting into the adjoining room before anyone can protest.

  Gamera follows. I look over my shoulder to make sure the military men aren’t watching before unzipping my duffel bag and motioning for him to climb inside.

  “It’s not ideal,” I whisper as he shrinks down into a beetle and hops in. “But it’s the best I can do right now.”

  I pull out an old satellite phone—I keep the new one in my pocket at all times in case Sam calls—before putting on my jacket and slinging the bag over my shoulder, trying to be careful about not knocking Gamera around too much inside. Back in the foyer, I toss the older phone to Noto.

  “It’s secure,” I say. “I’ll contact you when I can. Keep looking for anything that might help us.”

  He’s interrupted by more screeching outside, followed by shouting. Lujan’s walkie-talkie crackles.

  “Five unknown aircraft, coming in fast!”

  “Hold your position!” Lujan shouts into a handset. He turns to me. “We need to get out of here, now. If the chopper gets hit, it’s a long way back to DC, and we’re sure as hell not getting there on the highway. It’s jammed for miles.”

  “Go!” Noto says. “Good luck.”

  I nod. And then I’m running.

  We’re only a few feet out the doorway before I spot the Mogadorian skimmers headed straight for Ashwood.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WE’RE HALFWAY ACROSS THE LAWN WHEN A HUMVEE crashes through the iron gates leading into the estates. It speeds towards us, eventually turning on a dime and screeching to a halt on the opposite side of a short brick fence separating two lots. Doors open. I see the pale faces of Mogadorians. And then suddenly Briggs is pulling me to the ground, shoving me behind one of the FBI vehicles parked on the grass between the house and the helicopter. My breath is knocked out. Glass rains down around me as the car’s windows shatter.

  “Stay down!” Briggs shouts. He joins the Feds at the back of the SUV and starts shooting in the direction of the Mogs.

  Behind me, agents break out the second-floor windows of Adam’s old house and start firing. From my position, I can’t tell where Lujan’s at.

  Five birds land on the ground around me. Their claws tremble, hinting at transformation. I look back at the porch and see Noto. Blood’s dripping from a burn mark on the shoulder of his suit. I point to him.

  “Protect the others!” I whisper loud enough for them to hear me.

  They cock their heads and stare back blankly.

  “Go!” I shout.

  They scatter. Briggs looks back at me, reloading his rifle. He barks something into his walkie-talkie and then turns to me, shouting.

  “When I start shooting, you move. Get to the chopper.”

  I nod while gasping, trying to catch my breath. My bag is undulating on the ground beside me. I pat it, trying to tell Gamera that I’m all right. He could break out if he wanted to, I’m sure, but if we’re about to take to the sky, I don’t want to risk losing him.

  Above us the skimmers have circled and are coming in for a pass. There’s a loud banging sound from across the lawn as one of the craft goes up in flames. I follow the trail of smoke from the explosion down to the helicopter. That’s when I realize it’s a gunship, likely full of all sorts of weaponry.

  “Go!” Briggs shouts, opening fire again.

  I sprint, focusing in on the chopper and ignoring everything else around me. For someone who’s spent the majority of the last decade in an induced coma, muscles atrophying and disintegrating, I make a hell of a
good run for it. Ashwood is a blur, but I’m aware of gunfire all around me and can hear the sizzle and electric pulse of the Mogadorian blasters firing. There’s another bang from the chopper. In my peripheral vision, I see the Mog Humvee go up in flames.

  It turns out Lujan is already in the helicopter, firing from what I think is a grenade launcher. He pulls me inside when I get there, half pushing me towards a seat in the back. I buckle in, wedging my bag between my feet, trying to weigh the pros and cons of unleashing Gamera now. The problem is that I don’t know these men, or where I’m even going. With all the pain and suffering that’s happened because of my actions in the past, I couldn’t stand the thought of Gamera or any of the Chimærae ending up dissected on a lab table in some government research facility in the name of science.

  Lujan yells into a walkie-talkie.

  “Asset on board. We’re taking off in five seconds whether you’re here or not.”

  It’s a command not only for Briggs, but for the pilot, who nods.

  There’s a second soldier in the cockpit in addition to the pilot. I assume he’s the one targeting with the gunship’s main weapons. Another soldier is adjusting the mount on a huge machine gun pointing out the side of the chopper opposite where I entered. His eyes are on the sky, focused on the incoming skimmers, firing away.

  Briggs practically throws himself into the chopper a few seconds later. He shouts when he lands, then scrambles to his knees. One of his boots is covered in blood, and his left arm dangles limply at his side.

  “Get us the hell out of here!” Lujan barks at the pilot. He turns to the man on the gun. “Mark your targets.”

  As the chopper shudders and begins to shoot up, I attempt to help Briggs into the seat beside me, asking if he’s okay. But he shakes me off, gritting his teeth as he buckles in. I lean forward, trying to get a glimpse of the incoming ships.

  Three skimmers open fire at once. Our chopper veers to one side, throwing us all about as we narrowly evade being hit. Carnage rains down on Ashwood, and we’re caught in the cross fire. I brace myself and resist the urge to vomit. This is the first time I’ve been in a helicopter. At least that I’m aware of.

  “Knock those bastards out of the sky!” Lujan shouts.

  Machine gun fire fills the air, followed by the acrid, metallic smell of discharged rounds. A bigger weapon fires from somewhere near the front of the craft. I clench my jaw and grip the straps holding me in so hard I think I might be drawing blood.

  Shock waves from an explosion somewhere outside rock the helicopter. A skimmer goes down in flames.

  “Damn,” Briggs says. “One of those Bureau bastards must have been packing a Stinger.”

  We fly forward. One skimmer circles Ashwood, but the other is in fast pursuit of us, darting and flying zigzag loops to avoid the shots still being fired from our helicopter.

  “Whatever you found in that base,” Lujan says, shouting over the noise, “they must not want it to get out.”

  What did we miss? Or what are we overlooking?

  “I haven’t found anything,” I say.

  “Yeah, but they probably don’t know that.”

  “Could be they’re just pissed-off aliens,” Briggs mutters.

  As he speaks, he awkwardly tries to pull up his blood-soaked left pant leg with his right arm.

  “Let me help,” I offer.

  He takes a few deep breaths, sweat beading on his forehead, before leaning back into his seat. I take that as an okay and manage to get his pant leg pulled out of his boot and up over a hole that’s been shot clean through his calf. He points to a med kit attached to the inner hull and then talks me through cleaning and covering the wound with a compression bandage.

  “Caught me midsprint,” he says between instructions and long strings of profanity. “Came down hard on my shoulder. Think I knocked it out of the socket.”

  “I can try to put it back in if you want.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  “Technically . . . ,” I say, “I’m an astronomer.”

  Briggs just stares back at me, wheels turning in his head as he thinks about how to respond. But he doesn’t get a chance to. One of the skimmer shots hits us, and we take a sudden dip, dropping what must be hundreds of feet in the air in the course of seconds. I’m sure we’re going to crash, but the pilot levels us out.

  “Dammit,” I hear Lujan shout as he picks the gunner up off the floor and helps him get back to his post.

  “We can’t outrun this thing!” the pilot shouts.

  As Lujan confers with the other soldiers, I strain to look out the window. That’s when I see it: the Mogadorian warship hovering over Washington DC.

  “Impossible,” I murmur, knowing full well it’s not, that it’s real. But seeing the giant ship in person is something I’m not prepared for, even after all the TV coverage. It’s awe inspiring in the worst possible way.

  Below us the city seems eerily quiet, at least from what I can tell. No smoke rising from the buildings. No jets flanking the alien monstrosity blocking the twilight sky from our nation’s capital.

  “Where’s the rest of the army?” I ask. “The National Guard? Where are our defenses?”

  “Emphasis was put on the evacuation of high-value assets,” Briggs says. “Most of our targets were in the city. You’re one of the few we had to secure by air. Otherwise, we’re under orders to stay grounded. The chopper’s going to drop us near our destination. It’ll serve as a distraction if we need cover while we make the rest of the way on foot.”

  “I don’t think we’re getting dropped anywhere if we can’t shake this skimmer.”

  Briggs looks at me, confused.

  “That’s what we’ve been calling those smaller Mog ships,” I say.

  He considers this. “Beats UFOs, I guess.”

  The chopper shakes again. Lujan’s yelling at the two men in the cockpit. Something about avoiding collateral damage. Briggs starts shaking his head.

  “All right,” he says, leaning his hurt shoulder towards me and looking in the opposite direction. “Do it. Fix my arm.”

  “You’re sure?” I ask.

  “If we land in a hot zone I don’t want to be limping and unable to aim. Just get it over with.”

  While I’m aware of how this should work physically, I’ve never actually put someone’s shoulder back into its socket. Briggs closes his eyes as I take my seat belt off, angling my body as best I can to get some leverage.

  “I’m going to count to three,” I say, grabbing his arm. “One . . .”

  “Hold on,” Lujan shouts back to us. “We’re going to try something, and this is gonna get bumpy.”

  The helicopter veers, throwing me into Briggs. There’s a POP when I hit him.

  “Shit!” he shouts.

  I think I’ve accidentally reset his shoulder.

  It takes a few seconds to understand what the pilot’s doing. Pulling back and slowing down has put the skimmer right beside us: in the perfect line of fire for our machine gun. Bullets rip through its hull, shredding the alien ship.

  “Wahoo!” the gunner shouts.

  The alien ship’s cockpit goes up in flames, smoke trailing out of it.

  Briggs lets out a long breath. “That’s one way to lose a tail.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Lujan says. “You got the piece of shit. Looks like—”

  He stops as we watch the skimmer veer to the side, heading right for us. Its pilot is making one final attempt to destroy his target. Our chopper shoots forward, but not in time. The skimmer hits the back of our craft, our tail rotor snapping. And then we’re spiraling down towards the grass below, a plummeting wreckage of glass and metal and screams.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I’M AWOKEN BY A SLAP TO THE FACE. MY EYES shoot open, but the world is fuzzy and full of smoke, nothing but blurry shapes and disorienting darkness. For a few seconds I’m afraid I’m back inside the Mog containment pod and that everything that’s happened in the last few months—
my escape, reuniting with Sam—was nothing more than one long dream in an induced coma.

  Someone is shouting, but I can’t figure out what he’s saying, the sound distorted in my head. I feel myself falling forward and then before I can make sense of what’s happening, someone’s pulling me, dragging me.

  Another slap to the face. This definitely isn’t Anu or Zakos: they both preferred needles and blades over getting their hands dirty with human subjects.

  Slowly everything comes into focus, and I start to remember what’s going on. I prop myself up on my hands and knees in a soft patch of grass, coughing, trying to catch my breath. My lungs feel like they’re full of smoke and fire. The first things I see are the helicopter and skimmer, scorched mangles of twisted metal a hundred yards away. Lujan and Briggs stand over me, the latter leaning against a tree, taking as much weight off his injured leg as he can. Both their faces are smudged with something dark. The edge of the warship is overhead, blotting out the sky.

  As I continue to gasp for air, my head spins. Getting to my feet is a wobbly process, Lujan stepping in to keep me from falling over. Finally, though, I feel grounded enough to assess our surroundings. That’s when I see it, lit up in front of us and blazing against what is now almost full-on night.

  “That’s . . . ,” I start, but I can’t finish the thought. I’m too overwhelmed by the realization of where we are, of what’s happened.

  “The Washington Monument,” Lujan says. “We’re lucky we went down here, otherwise we might have had civilian casualties. We’re not far from our destination.”

  The fact that crash-landing in the middle of half a dozen national landmarks is considered a good thing is probably more telling about the current state of the world than it should be.

  “The others?” I ask, remembering the men on board.

  “They didn’t make it,” Briggs says.

  There’s something else nagging in the back of my mind, but my thoughts are a jumble. Blood drips down my face from my left temple. I must have hit my head in the crash. As if I didn’t have enough brain damage already.