where a small band of survivors had weathered the early storm of the invasion some eleven years before.
Even after the arrival of Stonewall’s brigades and Tom Prescott’s band of roving soldiers the lake kept that isolated feel. Now-so many changes and so many years later-the center of The Empire bustled with activity.
Although Trevor remained far away at the front lines, the estate had regained its mantle as the heart of humanity’s fight for survival. Many of the functions the ill-fated President Evan Godfrey had transferred to Washington DC during his temporary reign returned to the estate. As a result, trucks and cars and helicopters constantly buzzed the area. The two lane perimeter road often grew congested with traffic.
He found it hard to believe so much time had passed; that the fledgling band of survivors had grown into a nation.
From survivors to conquerors. From an extended family to an Empire. Over the course of those years the changes felt gradual, to the point he hardly noticed.
Through it all he maintained a sort of detachment, even when traveling to Atlanta to bring the captured Hivvan matter-makers on line; even when investigating the strange structure in the Ohio countryside that had facilitated Trevor’s disappearance four years ago.
Omar relied on fronts to maintain that detachment, including a finely honed sense of sarcasm and a forced accent to comply with the stereotype of his Indian heritage. Yet those fronts could not help him now. As he watched the birds play and the sun flicker, Omar felt a sense of doom falling like a shroud over everything. It pierced his well-cultivated detachment and brought an ache to his heart.
Omar raised the cigarette to his lips and inhaled a deep drag.
More than a decade ago he came to Trevor’s estate with a six-year-old son, an eleven-year-old daughter, and Anita, his wife.
His boy now worked with a logistics and transportation company supporting garrison units along the northern border. According to last week’s letter, he operated from the ghost city of Toronto. Omar found small comfort in his son serving away from the front lines, but also knew that eventually everyone would face Voggoth’s onslaught.
His daughter worked as a pharmacist/nurse at a hospital outside of Virginia Beach. Last time they had spoken on the phone, his daughter told him that she saw surprisingly few wounded come through her ward. Omar did not tell her that the reason so few wounded reached the rear area was because the troops retreated too fast to save them.
Omar tasted another puff of tobacco to sooth his nerves. Post-Armageddon cigarettes were far cruder than the old world’s, but also more direct in delivering their effects.
My family. What has happened to us?
Of course he had always known that his children would leave home someday. The pain of watching them make off for a new life without you is a hardship for which every parent prepares but it still comes as a bitter pill. But that pain was meant to be shared with the one woman he had ever loved, his beautiful wife, Anita.
He turned his eyes to the King sized bed. The sheets on one-half of that bed were asunder from a night of tossing and turning. On the other side the sheets remained neatly tucked, having been unused for the third night in five.
It seemed to Omar he no longer shared his home with his wife. She had found a new home. Or an obsession. An obsession that threatened to devour not only her time and attention, but her sanity.
For a long time now Anita Nehru no longer lived at the A-frame house along the coast of Harveys Lake. For a long time now Anita Nehru lived in Hell.
Anita Nehru walked in sluggish strides along a catwalk enclosed in heavy glass. A line of containment pens the size of small gymnasiums stretched below, all with transparent ceilings.
One pen held a large predator known as a Shellsquid. A study of the radiation damage done to the creature’s stem cells suggested it came from the same world as the Duass. At the moment the creature rested silently in one corner with its tentacles withdrawn inside what resembled a conical shell.
Anita paused and stared at the predator with a blank gaze. Bags carried under her eyes. The white lab coat she wore smelled from two days’ worth of sweat and wear. Her once-striking long black hair hung in tangled strands.
She moved on-zombie-like-to the next pen. This one presented the biggest puzzle in all of the Red Rock Research Facility. The creature in Large Specimen Containment Area Number Three had been in custody for several years.
Not so long ago, this fifteen-foot tall Stick Ogre resembled a horrific combination of a walking-stick insect and a bald humanoid. Stick Ogres fed primarily on various tree leaves and fruit and their excrement proved not only highly pungent, but highly fertile.
While quite capable of defending their nesting areas-even using small trees as clubs-Stick Ogres usually remained quiet and reclusive.
That had changed in the blink of an eye last year.
The creature in Large Specimen Containment Area Number Three roared and slammed its large body into the walls of its cell, almost continuously. Even the thick safety glass and soundproofing could not muffle its raucous hollers.
It no longer resembled that combination of insect and humanoid. The once slender but tall animal had become wide and lined with blood-red muscles, as if it were a body that had shred its skin. The face had morphed into a devil’s skull complete with a trio of bony horns and eyes seemingly changed from organic to mechanical. Deadly talons sprouted like daggers from paws at the end of its arms and legs. Sharp metal spines — metal! — protruded along its back.
It had not been fed in a long time; the last keeper who tried lost an arm, tranquilizers had no effect, and security refused to enter the cage with anything less than lethal intentions.
As far as she could tell, this metamorphosis occurred instantaneously early last July to all Stick Ogres. In fact, her research teams tracked instant transformations in nearly three dozen different types of invading entities. Some of those had been docile prior, a few predators. All had changed into deadly beasts with a rabid disposition.
Both type A and type B Giant Sloths had morphed into iron-plated beasties capable of spitting fire with a kind of flame thrower protruding from their mouths. Two of those were in containment up on Sub-Level 6.
Reports suggested that a similar fate had befallen all of the alien invaders known as “The Tribe of the Red Hand,” or Feranites, resulting in a new race of robotic soldiers joining Voggoth’s legions.
As in the case of the Stick Ogre, security cameras captured the instant evolution of the Sloths on tape. The original animals had grown completely still, then vibrated, and then their new selves grew out of their flesh as if each living cell changed, one by one, into the new entity.
This was no natural evolution like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly, but some kind of biological alchemy. Eyes replaced by artificial lenses, blood, bones, and hair into grease, metal, and wires.
The creature below stopped its rage for a moment; something it rarely did.
Anita leaned against the glass. The surface felt cool. Her sleep-deprived mind worked the pieces of the equation over and over.
According to radiation levels found inside the stem cells of the Stick Ogres and the Sloths, those creatures came to Earth from the same point of origin as the Feranites. But not anymore. They no longer had stem cells. They no longer had any living matter within their frames. Like statues or rock formations, the creatures were made of molecules but not of living tissue. They could be destroyed, but not killed; not exactly.
So how can they thrash about? How can they roar? Why can they walk and attack?
Her thoughts fell away as she realized that the demonic thing in the cell below stared up at her, as if studying her.
She backed away from the glass and stumbled. Her arms and hands fidgeted-as they almost always did anymore-in a sign of nerves.
The creature roared and ran headlong into a wall. She felt the impact as a distant tremor.
Anita closed her eyes tight and let the blackness provide some measure of peace. But it was an illusion. Peace would not come to Anita Nehru; not as long as these mysteries gripped her in obsession. Not as long as she felt an answer lay within her grasp if only she pressed a little harder.
Trevor had assigned her to Red Rock despite her lack of formal scientific training. Her gift did not come from hard core research, but from an ability to take raw data and turn it into usable information. Indeed, her initial
