important was stripped from her.
Her words-spoken seemingly by another woman-replayed, “This is a different world. A world where I’m not a soldier, and you’re not a leader. It’s a dream world. We’re we could just be together.”
Nina checked herself and considered. Could it be true? As far back as she could remember she had only wished to be a fighter. It encompassed all she was. Her reflexes, her eye for battle, her instincts-all smaller parts of the greater sum of a soldier. And she had never considered any other possibility. Sure, she had faked her way through school and kept her true self hidden, but never had she denied the fabric of her person.
Now she wondered-is there more?
Nina shook her head.
Now is not the time to think of these things.
For a soldier, confusion could prove deadly and she found more confusion in her heart than ever before.
She pushed hard. She pushed hard to kick any doubts-no, not doubts. Hope. Hope for being more. For having more in her life the way Denise had given her more. Having a daughter had not made her any less of a soldier. In fact, she accomplished more in the years with Denise than in all the time before. Denise gave her a reason to fight other than instinct. A real purpose.
“Hey, Captain,” Carl Bly’s voice pulled Nina from her thoughts. She appreciated the interruption.
“Yes, Carl,” she answered sarcastically, “You made a hell of a shot with that Javelin the other day. Now shut up about it.”
Oliver Maddock found that very funny.
Nina knew Carl had not been bragging again, but it felt like the right moment for a joke. She had one or two such moments a month.
She stood, walked to the dying fire, and sat next to them.
“Shit, Cap, I was just wondering where we’re headed.”
They knew she had received a list of possible targets during a radio transmission earlier. Their choice of missions remained entirely at her discretion with the occasional intel reports from command serving only as suggestions.
“We’re heading further north. Seems Voggoth has got an implant camp out at Fort Larned. I want to hit them.”
“Whew,” Carl reacted. “Implants? Won’t that have some heavy stuff guarding it?”
“No,” Nina shook her head. “Nothing to it. They grab a bunch of unarmed folks and march them up there to get a slug slipped in. Probably light infantry. Easy target if we do it right and along the way, well, I’m just saying we can save a lot of people who would otherwise be monks.”
“Love it,” Caesar grinned.
They grew silent as the soldiers contemplated the next mission.
A thought popped in to Nina’s mind. A question, actually. She could not be sure from where it came, but it slipped out of her lips and around the fire before she could stop.
“What do you guys miss from before all this?”
They stared, confused at the question.
Vince asked, “What, well, what do you mean?”
“You know,” Nina felt her cheeks flush with embarrassment but she suspected the dim light hid her blushing, “what do you miss from before the invasion and stuff. You know- all this.”
The other Dark Wolves knew the expression ‘all this’, but never once had their Captain shown any interest in life before Armageddon.
The way the men gaped at her-well it made Nina wish for a Stumphide to come charging from the forest and cause a firefight to break out.
“That was a long time ago,” Bly said. “Not sure I can even remember what that was like.”
“The mountains back home,” Oliver Maddock answered in a different tone; softer. In the orange flicker of the fire, Nina saw his eyes glaze over. “We rock-climbed Snowdown-that’s the biggest bloody mountain in all of Wales-a couple o’ times before I joined up.”
“Who was ‘we’?” Nina asked.
Maddock shrugged. “Just a girl-well, she was a little younger than me but we grew up together outside of Cardiff. Gentle creature; foxy one she was; far too good for the likes of me.”
Bly joked, “Now how come you never went talking about no girl before. Afraid I’d swim over there and steal her away?”
Maddock smiled through a fog of lost memories as he answered, “Never anythin’ serious, you hear? I ‘spose I always hoped it would be. She had this way ‘bout her. She could look at you and it was like she was lookin’ right through ya’. You know what I’m sayin’? Last time I saw Cai we spent the day down along Three Cliffs Bay before I shipped ‘cross the pound to hang out with you trogs.”
“Best move you ever made, limy,” Carl Bly slapped Oliver on the back.
“Yeah, well, the shit hit the fan and that’s ‘bout the end of that story, mun.”
“What about you, Captain?” Vince asked and he studied Nina close, as if hoping to peel away another layer of his mysterious leader. “What do you miss?”
Nina shook her head. For a split second the answer ‘pineapple’ came to her mind but she could not fathom why.
“I don’t know. I honestly-I honestly don’t know.”
“Captain was born for this shit,” Bly grinned. “Hell, yeah, if it weren’t for all this, she’d be bored to hell.”
A few chuckles broke out. Nina flashed a timid smile.
Fort Larned sat on flat ground five miles west of Larned, Kansas and just south of Route 156. An access road cut from 156 through a tree line then across fifty yards of grassland to the fort’s buildings which were arranged in a square shape around a large courtyard. Light woodlands brushed against the eastern and western perimeter while the south offered wide open plains and a clear field of vision for the defenders.
Nina, Vince Caesar, and the three elkhounds hid in cover to the west; Bly and Maddock to the east.
Nina spied one Spider Sentry walking on its spindly legs across the courtyard and one of the muscle-bound gray-skinned Ogres. Unlike the one guarding the convoy, this Ogre carried a giant iron mace with a spiked cube at the end.
Most of the facility’s garrison consisted of monks dressed in various shades of cloth stitched to resemble robes. Nina expected they wore lethal pellet-guns on their forearms but she saw each wielding The Order’s weapon of choice: swords, although their blades lacked any sense of style or even a true hilt; merely thin, sharp poles.
In any case, she stopped counting monks at 20 because a more important count grabbed her attention: people.
They came in a variety of shapes and sizes. Through her binoculars she saw several elderly men wearing clothes that gave them away as farmers, a teenage boy in ripped jeans, a soldier in green BDUs with his arm in a sling, a young couple with a daughter no more than eight clinging to her parents. The monks herded the group out from the barracks toward a bent flag pole at the center of the courtyard.
Nina watched one of the assimilated monks shove a middle-aged woman. She spotted a couple of young black boys try and slip around a corner only to be turned back by the Ogre.
She counted 20 human beings congregating in the middle of the place. Nina heard sobs, pleas for mercy, and moans of agony.
Her binoculars fixed on one of the two larger buildings on the north side; the Company Officers Quarters. The stately white rails along the front porch were now covered in wiry vines that grew like a cancer upon the vintage 1800s structure. The openings where doors and windows had once been now appeared more like cave entrances laced in a thick buildup of slimy green mold.
Implant incubator, she thought. And she knew the people in the courtyard would be sent inside that chamber of horrors in small groups.
The Order did not need such assembly lines; implants could worm their way into the hide of victims easily enough, but these assembly lines both improved the odds of successful implantation and allowed for faster processing of prisoners.
However, Nina found it odd that she saw only 20 people preparing for implantation. That seemed a small catch for an implant center. It struck her that Voggoth appeared most focused on destruction as part of his push
