32
Edwards
The world had gone to shit, but the five men stationed at Outpost Hood had it made. The once frigid summit of Mount Hood, covered in snow year round, now rarely dipped below fifty degrees. At lower elevations, including the Timberline Lodge, where the five men bunked, the average temperature hovered around eighty. The lodge had been a hotel and ski resort before the aberration leveled the planet, and while there were no chefs, maids or hosts to attend them, they still had access to the many beds, kitchen, fireplaces, pool tables and a wine cellar. The brass knew about the cushy accommodations. They didn’t know about the wine.
Despite having access to alcohol, and a lot of it, the men understood the importance of their mission, and they never drank within five hours of their shift. While four men recuperated in the Timberline, the fifth manned the lookout tower constructed atop Mount Hood’s peak. The hundred-foot-tall tower, topped with a solar powered communications array, combined with the mountain’s 11,249 feet, allowed the lookouts to see 130 miles in all directions. On a clear day, they could see the Pacific Ocean as a streak of blue outlining the horizon.
And since their target was taller than the mountain upon which they eked out a living, Corporal Bryan Edwards estimated that its spines had risen into view when it was still 250 miles away. If it was in a hurry, it could close that distance in less than an hour, but it hadn’t been seen moving anywhere fast in the last ten years.
They’d been watching the aberration’s meandering approach for two days. The beast seemed content to languish in the water. But Outpost Hood’s five-man team remained on high alert, camping out at the tower’s base, observing every movement and reporting every detail back to Command, which was currently located in the Raven Rock Mountain Complex—a nuclear bunker buried beneath Blue Ridge Summit in Pennsylvania. Before the aberration’s rise, it was often referred to as an ‘underground Pentagon.’ Now it was the last vestige of the United States government and military command, perhaps the very last organized resistance to the creature left on the planet. From what Edwards understood, humanity, including most of the U.S. population, had been reduced to tribal living. People had to compete with ‘Fuck-Jobs’—
Fobs
for short—Outpost Hood’s name for the smaller, funky looking monsters that had sprung to life in the wake of the giant’s passing, and had since inhabited every corner of the Earth.
After the days of mass destruction, when the aberration followed a path of devastation, setting off every natural disaster already poised to happen and leveling every single nuclear reactor—not to mention the large number of nuclear warheads that had been launched at it—survivors primarily had to fear the Fobs. While there were docile species, roaming in great packs, migrating across the terrain like they weren’t planetary squatters, the predatory Fobs were savage things. Large, hungry, savage and unpredictable.
Outpost Hood routinely fought off individual hunters roaming the mountains for food. Solo predators weren’t the biggest threat. It was the pack hunters that really concerned them, moving in numbers ranging from fifteen to fifty. Fob packs were responsible for wiping out many of the larger North American tribes that had refused government support, which included soldiers and weaponry. The only real defenses against predatory Fob packs were training and a lot of bullets—two things the men of Outpost Hood had in excess.
The oldest of them, a Master Sergeant, was just twenty-three. He was about ten years too young for the rank in the Old World, but with few men to choose from, the smartest and most capable of them rose through the ranks quickly. The Master Sergeant could fight, like a soldier, or like an animal if need be. They’d faced three assaults by Fob packs, losing only one man in the past five years. But this was the first time they’d spotted the aberration in all that time.
There were outposts scattered around North and Central America, reporting on Fob movements and populations, but their main task was creating a network of warning stations. Communication with advanced satellites had been lost a long time ago, and most information was now shared via radio, or in person. The most important outposts at key locations, were manned by military trained teams. Some were operated by cooperative tribes. But the vast majority of them were under the oversight of solo operators, most of whom were civilians who had ‘gone native.’ The men used to joke about people like that—Fob-Crazies—until they learned the Master Sergeant’s step-mother was one of them.
Edwards yawned. He would have never guessed that watching a planet-conquering monster would be boring, but the thing hadn’t even made landfall yet. He peered through the telescope aimed out the long window, one of four that provided a 360 degree view. He could see the creature’s face. Its armored, black carapace burned hot from the inside out. Long tubes dangled and twisted, luminous with energy or bioluminescence. After fifteen years, no one knew for certain. Fluid drained from the tubes, sometimes spraying, sometimes oozing.
“C’mon, you big bitch,” Edwards grumbled. “Do something.”
And then it did.
Edwards gasped and stood from his chair, but he kept his eye glued to the eyepiece. “Uh…” He knew he should call the others, that they would need to report this, but astonishment stole the words from his mind. He’d heard about this, but had never seen it. Few people living ever had. Most people who got close to the aberration died. He’d only heard of one man ever touching it, but he was pretty sure that guy was 1) dead, and 2) a legend.
The big plates lining the aberration’s back lifted up, giving it the look of something about to spread its wings and fly off. But when the city-sized shell panels dropped back down, a lake’s worth of chunky mush squeezed out and fell to the ocean. From this distance, and because of the creature’s great size, everything looked to be happening in slow motion, but the globs of mush—eggs if the stories were to be believed—had miles to fall before reaching the water. The plates pulsed up and down, shedding more material in the Pacific. In a few years, all that stuff would grow and evolve, becoming new lifeforms.
New Fobs for us to kill
, Edwards thought, and then he remembered his job.
“It’s shedding!” he shouted, and then he banged on the tower’s solid metal floor with the aluminum baseball bat they kept at the tower for hitting rocks, not for self-defense. “Get up here!”
Edwards knew he was forgetting all kinds of protocols, and how things like this were supposed to be communicated, but he was just twenty. No one—at least no one in Outpost Hood—would blame him for acting his age, and he could feel the others scaling the ladder beneath him. The message had been received.
The hatch behind him squeaked open. He glanced back as Wittman climbed into the tower first. He looked more excited than afraid. At just sixteen years old, he was the youngest of them. Wittman hadn’t been with them during the last Fob assault, and he had no memories of the world before all this. Edwards didn’t remember much, but there were flashes of things he loved, including his parents, his dog and SpongeBob SquarePants. “Let me see!”
Edwards stepped aside, letting the lanky kid bend over the telescope for a look. Despite being the youngest, he was also the tallest of them, and the most childlike, sporting a mop of blond hair and vibrant blue eyes. The kid didn’t mind the end of the world, because he didn’t know anything else. He was…content.
“Ho-lee-shit.” He was more than content. “Badass.”
“Hardly.” The Master Sergeant’s silent approach and sudden arrival made both men leap. Edwards had heard the man referred to as ‘Sergeant Ninja’ before. At first, Edwards had assumed it was a quasi-racist term stemming from the Sergeant’s Asian heritage, but the man was half-Korean, not Japanese, and Edwards had learned over time that the nickname had been earned. The Sergeant was a stealthy man. Light on his feet. And though he was an inch shorter than Wittman, he was built like an athlete, or rather, like what he was—an Army Ranger. One of the few left. All of the most important outposts were led by Rangers.
The two young soldiers stepped aside for their slightly older, but far more authoritative comrade, letting him look through the telescope. The Sergeant looked up from the lens a moment later and turned to Edwards. “You’re on watch. Call it in.”
Edwards nodded and moved to the radio station on the far side of the lookout tower. He sat down at the desk and powered up the radio.
Behind him, Felder and Gutshall ascended through the hatch, looking bleary-eyed. Despite it being three in the afternoon, the two men had been sleeping in preparation for their night shift. Without talking, they each took a peek through the telescope, shaking their heads and muttering curses.
“Can I go back to sleep?” Felder muttered, rubbing his fingers through his greasy black hair.
“Can you take a shower?” Gutshall replied, though he wasn’t much cleaner.
The pair chuckled. Two weeks of night shift could leave you with a looser sense of humor.
“Uhh,” Wittman said. “I don’t think you’re going to get to do either.”
Before he could explain why, the Master Sergeant nudged him out of the way and looked through the lens again. He spoke without taking his eye away from the telescope. “Edwards.”
Edwards sat up straight. The Sergeant’s tone had shifted toward ominous. “Sir.”
“Inform command that the aberration has shed into the Pacific Ocean off the Oregon coast, and it is now moving inland.”
“Yes, sir. How…how fast is it moving?”
The silence that followed the question filled Edwards with a new kind of nervous. It felt like his organs were moving around, like some invisible specter had reached inside his guts and shifted them about.
“ETA, thirty minutes.”
“Thirty minutes?” Felder said, nearly shouting. “Is it coming for Hood?”
Part of what made Mount Hood such a strategic location for an Outpost was that it provided staggering views in all directions. But as one of the region’s still active volcanoes, it was also a potential target. And yet, there were bigger targets in the geographic neighborhood. Just under six hundred miles away to the east was Yellowstone National Park, one of the world’s largest natural disasters waiting to happen, still untouched. The park sat atop a super volcano capable of expelling 240 cubic miles of magma. Its ash cloud would consume the northern hemisphere, and whether or not the warmer Earth would freeze without sunlight, most life of the non-Fob variety would perish.
The codename for the potential disaster was GONE—Game Over Now, Earthlings—coined by a post-apocalyptic science-fiction author turned science advisor. They all knew the term. They’d heard about it growing up. And as members of Outpost Hood, it was their job to report the possibility of such an event, should the aberration appear in this part of the world.
After a few more minutes, the Sergeant—a God-fearing man—let out an uncharacteristic curse, “Shit.” He stood and looked ready to punch something, clenching his fists. The men near him stepped back.
Edwards sat still, finger hovering over the transmit button. Things had been changing so fast, he had yet to send a single message. “Sir? What message should I send?”
“I’ll do it,” the Sergeant said, taking the mic from Edwards’s hand. The relieved Corporal retreated from the chair and moved to the telescope that the others had abandoned. He looked through the lens and flinched when he saw the aberration moving. It had reached the shore and struck out across Oregon. Its eight massive legs carried it miles with each step. The towering spikes on its back, rising at an angle, cut through the air, slicing through clouds. Its long tail swept back and forth, countering each step and maintaining perfect balance. He watched its broad feet strike the Earth, spreading wide, dispersing weight and reducing the impact it had on the land. The creature weighed untold tons, but with two pairs of legs always in contact with the ground, its girth never pushed down on a single location—unless it intended to. The thing had flattened mountains by stomping on them. The black armor, glowing red-orange from the inside, gave it the look of a mountain-sized demon.
There are monsters like this in the Bible,
Edwards thought, and then he made a mental note to ask the Sergeant. He’d know.
There was a part of him that felt relieved the aberration wasn’t heading for Mount Hood. He liked it here. And it was possible that the ash cloud rising from Yellowstone might never reach them. Despite being just six hundred miles away, the ash would be carried east, and then around the globe. If they were lucky, and the Pacific wind currents pulled the ash south, this part of the world might remain an oasis. But that wouldn’t help their friends on the East Coast, nor would it help humanity’s struggle against extinction.