Beyond Armageddon: Book 02 - Empire (4 page)

Trevor smiled and imagined how the
LA Times
or
NY Post
would have covered such a story years before. The first paragraph would have speculated about undo civilian casualties, openly wondered if the Hivvan strength had been overstated, then provided a military “expert” to lash out at the tactics and strategies used.

           
Things had changed for the better, to Trevor’s mind.

He never tried to influence the press. Even if he wanted to, he simply did not have the time. Nonetheless, the new media remained supportive of the cause, probably because that cause had freed many of them from slavery or starvation.

           
Stone paused as he remembered one exception to the ‘supportive’ rule. Still, he would not let that bother him. He read on and enjoyed the glowing report of rescued slaves, crushed enemies, and the bravery of his soldiers.

Another page in the
Baltimore New Press
offered a rough sketch of the eastern third of what had once been the
United States
.

The areas liberated by Trevor’s armies were colored white in the sketch, including all of
Pennsylvania
, all but the northeastern parts of
New Jersey
, the southern half of
New York
state including key spots along the Hudson, all of
Delaware
,
Maryland
, and
Virginia
west to the
Appalachian Mountains
. The northern most third of
North Carolina
was now white, too.

That slate of white gave the impression humanity firmly controlled all that area, but Trevor knew the truth. No organized opposition existed within the new nation’s boundaries, but the people lived in isolated pockets with vast tracks of wild lands between.

Dangerous alien animals hid in the mountains, forests, and abandoned buildings. Travel between cities and towns meant heavily armed convoys. Life in the settlements bore little resemblance to life in the old world, due to constant shortages of food, medicine, clothing, power…the list went on. Only housing remained in great supply; plenty of vacant homes waited to replace ghosts.

On the map, a gray area marked the lands controlled by the “Grand Army of the
Hivvan
Republic
.” That included the balance of
North Carolina
,
South Carolina
, and
Georgia
. Big question marks rested over
Alabama
and northern
Florida
where the map cut off.

Trevor liked how the
Baltimore New Press
handled their war coverage. At the bottom of the same page, a statistic printed in bold gave meaning to the effort.

People liberated: 563,241.

That number, Trevor knew, came from his ‘Census Bureau.’ That number also sounded incredibly big. To have found so many people over the years seemed improbable. Yet Trevor knew that the areas they now controlled had once been home to 36 million people. This roughly translated into a 1.5% survival rate, meaning more than 35 million people in those areas died during Armageddon.

That accounted for the large patches of vacant towns and untraveled roads inside the ‘liberated’ zone. The number of saved people sounded large, but in reality was frighteningly small.

The 1.5% included large numbers of slaves freed from invaders who had beaten and worked them nearly to death for as long as five years.

Trevor felt a gentle shove as the Eagle increased speed. He hoped Rick would make good time. He wanted to get home fast; he had not seen his son for nearly a week.

During the first year of survival, Trevor thought he managed to grasp the rules of the new world: alien monsters lurking in every shadow and extraterrestrial armies trying to carve out zones of control. The key to victory, he knew, lay in finding survivors in the ruins and freeing hostages from alien captors.

Then came the curveball that challenged his understanding of it all: the 1.5% survival rate also included people who had “rode the ark”.

Oh, there were many names for the people who emerged through time and space covered in globs of green goo: Sleepers. Angels. Returnees. With time, one name won out: these people had “rode the ark.”

A fitting description, no doubt, because they disappeared during the early days of the calamity with no explanation. Most—including the
U.S.
government when there had still been a functioning
U.S.
government—believed those people vaporize. Not so.

Some force plucked them away from the fire of the Apocalypse just before or just as it started. Much as Noah saved his family and the animals before the Biblical great flood.

Trevor’s pre-war fiancée—Ashley Trump—and her entire neighborhood ‘rode the ark.’ What a surprise it had been when the vanished people of her neighborhood appeared out of nowhere one day, encased in coffin-like blobs of goo.

That was the way of those who ‘rode the ark.’ They were not merely waiting around hoping to be discovered. They appeared in areas shortly after that area came under human control, always within a certain distance from where they had disappeared.

For instance, missing cadets and teachers at the naval academy in
Annapolis
suddenly returned to the land of the living less than a week after Trevor personally led the assault clearing the city of ‘hostiles’. Those cadets and teachers reappeared scattered across campus.

The story always sounded the same with each of those blessed people. The same as Ashley’s story: they never saw it coming.

In Ashley’s case, while speaking on the phone with Trevor she suddenly felt a hot flash…and then opened her eyes as Trevor and Dante Jones pulled her from a case of green goo.

What did she remember?

She remembered talking with Trevor on the phone. Yet on some level, she understood things had changed. Not a complete understanding. She did not experience that passing of time, but knew it occurred.

In practice, for those who ‘rode the ark’ no real time elapsed. Their bodies either time-traveled or entered some sort of perfect stasis.

People suffering broken bones or a cough and cold or a headache when they disappeared awoke with those broken bones unhealed or with a sneeze on their lips or the desperate need for an aspirin. For them, awakening inside the slimy sarcophagi had simply been the next moment.

As random as those disappearances seemed, the return of the vanished showed they had not been random at all. Each batch included at least one, and usually more than one, person with important skills.

The military personnel from West Point and Annapolis; engineers and scientists from Georgetown University; a gifted doctor from a batch of empty cars on Interstate 80 by Milton, Pennsylvania; and many more. Without these experts and professional warriors, there would be no army to fight the Hivvans, only bands of refugees hiding and hoping to survive.

To date, Trevor’s forces had revived nearly 15,000 people who ‘rode the ark.’
 
He knew more awaited them in places such as the Citadel in
South Carolina
and the marine biology building at the
University
of
Miami
as well as Cubs fans at Wrigley field.

How many had been plucked from the world to keep them safe during the worst of the storm? And why them? Who had done it?

He incessantly questioned his mysterious benefactor, The Old Man, who granted Trevor gifts of knowledge, sanctuary, and control of the K9s when they first met. That entity sat by his campfire in the woods and remained tight-lipped about the ark. He either did not know or would not say.

So many mysteries; so many reasons to wonder. Yet none of it really mattered; not to Trevor Stone.

The Old Man once told Trevor he was a link in a chain; a man with a path to walk to keep humanity from dying and that he must survive, fight, and sacrifice.

He survived, at least so far.

He already fought an uncountable number of battles and knew many more were to come.

And he had made the most difficult sacrifice he could imagine; he gave up the only woman he truly loved,
Nina
Forest
.

The Old Man warned Trevor that his soul was damned. Damnation meant living a life filled with violence, a life devoid of anything other than the mission. At least he had his son, Jorge. And Ashley, of course. On some level or another.

           
Trevor put aside the paper, closed his eyes, and tried to shut out the questions and the worries for a spell.

–

Ashley walked into the den on the first floor of the estate and spoke to the boy who was only a few months past his third birthday: “What are you still doing up?”

           
Jorge crawled around the floor on his hands and knees wearing powder blue racecar pajamas and surrounded by large pieces of paper and crayons. The boy stopped his drawing and looked into the green eyes of his dark-haired mother.

           
“I’m waiting for father.”

           
Never ‘daddy’ or ‘dad’, always “father.”

           
Ashley leaned against the doorframe.

           
Tall bookshelves filled with everything from science fiction to reference to religion lined the room. A massive oak desk sat in front of French casement windows facing the south grounds. Illumination came from wall-mounted antique brass fixtures.

           
One part library, one part office, this stuffy room sat unused during Trevor’s first years in the mansion. Jorge turned it into a playroom of sorts.

           
“JB,” Ashley called her son by his initials. “I don’t know when your father will be home. He had important business and may not get back until morning.”

           
The blonde haired, blue-eyed boy shook his head. “He will be home tonight. He likes to tuck me to bed.”

           
Ashley frowned. JB tended to be right about such things.

           
She walked further into the den. A floorboard creaked underfoot.

           
“What is it you’re drawing?” She knelt to examine one of the crayon sketches.

           
“It is the battle in the south. Father was victorious again.”

           
‘
Victorious
.’
What three-year-old boy uses such a word?

           
“Isn’t he always?” Ashley chided.

           
“No.”

           
The unexpected answer gave her pause. JB drew another scene: a giant monster waving fists at a mass of stick-people.

           
She huffed and told him, “That’s enough for tonight, JB. It’s late.”

           
He stood and gave her a hug.

           
“Please, mom. I just
know
father will be here soon. Another few minutes?”

           
“I see,” she found it difficult to deny him. He was, after all, her boy. Her child. Perhaps the only thing—the only person—in the world that she knew actually loved her. The two spent a lot of time alone together waiting for ‘father’ to return.

           
“Okay, okay,” she kissed him on the forehead as he smiled in victory.

           
Ashley glanced at the classic grandfather clock
ticking
and
tocking
in the corner. “Ten more minutes by grandpa’s watch,” she told the boy, referring to the clock. “But that’s it. Understand?”

           
“Yes,” he hugged her again. “I love you, mommy.”

–

           
Eagle One flew over the mountains and into the basin holding
Harveys
Lake
. That lake had once been home to the region’s wealthy as well as seasonal summer dwellers of means.

           
Armageddon chased them away. During the first days, authorities urged evacuation to rescue stations. This ended disastrously for those who listened. Those who did not leave faced monsters and then starvation.

           
When the Old Man informed Trevor that he had to survive, fight, and sacrifice, he also informed the young man he would receive three gifts to help.

           
The lakeside estate came first, packed with survival gear and weapons. This had been his home during the early months. Eventually it morphed into the center point for rebuilding civilization.

           
His second gift proved more unusual: the ability to communicate with dogs, although he preferred to call them K9s or even “Grenadiers” as Stonewall McAllister nicknamed them.

           
Even after five years he did not fully understand how the communication worked, but it involved a combination of sound and mental projection.