“Ruckley,” Horn said, strapping his machine gun over his back. He started to lift her. “We’re going to get you out of here.”
Beckham kept his rifle trained toward the street. “Contacts back across the street.”
The cacophony of gunfire and flames nearly drowned out his voice.
He put a hand on Horn’s shoulder. “We need to get out of here.”
“We’re not leaving her here. She’s still alive.”
Horn cradled Ruckley in his arms. She groaned, eyes fluttering open.
“Master Sergeant,” she muttered.
“Where’s the rest of your team?” Beckham asked.
Ruckley winced. “I… I don’t know.”
— 14 —
“Everything’s falling apart,” Ringgold whispered as she looked over the report from the science team.
She wanted to throw her coffee mug against the wall of the war room deep in Galveston’s former Harbor House Hotel. Instead, she took a breath, trying to keep control while everything was spiraling away from her.
Once again, the New Gods had overwhelmed their forces in a matter of hours.
And like before, she was left wondering how.
She hoped someone on her team, anyone, could tell her something helpful. But so far General Cornelius, General Souza, and Lieutenant Festa didn’t know anything more than she did.
Her team wasn’t doing much better at keeping their emotions in check than she was. Festa and Souza both wore grimaces on their face like they had knives twisting into their sides.
“Someone, anyone, give me a sitrep,” she said. “What in the hell is going on?”
“Our teams are being routed and pushed back from the strip,” Souza said. “They’re taking heavy losses.”
“Then get them out of there now!” Ringgold said in a voice just shy of a shout.
“We’re trying to execute selective evacuation protocols,” Cornelius said.
“Everywhere we try to ID an LZ, it turns hot in seconds,” Souza added. “Primary and secondary LZs are occupied by hostiles. There are no clear evac sites.”
“Then make some,” Ringgold said, losing her patience. “We need to help these people. Can we reroute them somewhere we can secure?”
“We’re working on that, ma’am,” Cornelius said, face growing red with frustration.
He joined some of the officers huddled around the computers at the side of the room. They pored over the maps and monitors displayed in front of them, voices rising frantically.
Another team of communications officers manned computers coordinating the movements of the two task forces through the streets of Las Vegas. A fifty-five-inch monitor on one wall showed a map of the city, along with red blips to indicate where the ground forces had spotted hostiles. Green blips designated the locations of Allied States troops.
Too many of those green blips representing individual divisions and squads had already been crossed out as reports of confirmed KIAs filtered in. She watched another rash of green blips get crossed out, and an almost palpable pain struck through her gut.
“I’m getting confirmation that the explosions the teams are reporting aren’t from our demo crews,” Souza said. “The bombs going off were planted well before our teams got there.”
“What… but…” Ringgold began to say.
“This was a trap,” Cornelius said dryly. “They set enough explosives to bring down the whole damn city. They knew we were coming.”
“How?” Ringgold asked. “How are they ahead of us every single damn time!?”
No one had an answer and avoided her gaze.
Ringgold looked back down at the message Kate had sent her hours earlier. The doctor had reported a Santa Fe-based company operating out of Los Alamos National Laboratory called OrgoProct. Their science division was led by Charles Morgan, which seemed to link all the strange technologies of the New Gods. The evidence was circumstantial at best, but the story seemed to make more sense as Ringgold thought about it.
The most startling revelation was that the New Gods had no known ties to Las Vegas.
Was this a New Gods’ stronghold? Was it even an actual base?
Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe this was all a façade.
One thing was certain, the Prophet was more intelligent than any Alpha she had faced in the past decade. She was going to have to think well outside of the box to beat the evil abomination.
“Have we found any of their leadership?” Ringgold asked.
“No,” Souza replied. “However, Team Ghost is still within the UMC where they reported strong resistance. That kind of resistance might indicate New Gods leaders are nearby.”
“So there’s still hope,” Ringgold said, clinging to any remote chance they might yet succeed with their initial objective. But that ephemeral hope was fading with every KIA reported on the monitor. “Have we heard anything from Ghost recently?”
“Not since they went radio silent.”
“Almost all other units, even those on the retreat, are still engaged in skirmishes,” Cornelius said, returning to the table.
He clicked a button on his keyboard, and the main monitor in the room shifted to the view from a helmet-mounted camera on a TF Bravo squad leader.
The rattle of gunfire sizzled over the speakers. Flames erupted over the parapets of the Excalibur hotel. A few of the towers on the castle had crumbled.
“Hostiles at our twelve and three!” a voice yelled over the speakers.
More flashes of tracer fire cut through the black of night. Ghoulish screams filled the comm as monsters swarmed from the flames, hurdling over the debris and ripping into the soldiers.
Ringgold turned away at the sound of tearing flesh and anguished yells.
“This is what the evac sites look like,” Cornelius said, voice weak.
Cornelius switched to a feed from a helicopter. A door gunner manned an M-249 as the chopper swooped low over the fires spreading through the Vegas streets. The gunner raked machine gunfire over a pack of Variants, riddling their diseased flesh with bullets.
Despite the gunner’s best efforts, a pack of the beasts broke into the lines of soldiers on the ground.
Ringgold’s stomach clenched, her mouth going dry. Any hope she had had that Team Ghost might still find the Prophet was overshadowed by the massacre unfolding on the Vegas strip.
The New Gods had set this deception perfectly, luring
