Earthblood

“Then what?” asked Mac. “If nobody objects… or got a better idea, I’d kind of like to get off east and see my wives and my kids.”

“Sure.” Jim looked around. “We probably all feel that. Normally our folks would’ve been here for the landing. They all knew the time and day. Just another storm cloud that there’s not a single soul here to greet us.”

“Anyone noticed the walls?” said Pete Turner. “Now that it’s light…”

The lobby had been decorated with bright paintings, but they were all pitted and chipped with dozens and dozens of holes.

“Bullets,” said Jim.

“My guess, too.” The second pilot pointed through a half-open door, into the heart of the section of the base. “Went there for a leak in the night. Stumbled over something.” He paused. “Someone. No, more than one. Been a hell of a firefight here, Captain. There are dead outside and more in here.”

“Then we stick together.”

They came across the bodies of five of Stevenson’s highly trained security guards. The corpses had been mangled by predators, but there was enough left to see that they’d all been shot to death.

Jim knelt and examined the remains. “Looks like high-velocity hunting rifles. And all their weapons are gone.”

“I’m telling you,” insisted Jeff Thomas. “Leftist guerrillas. Took over the whole country.”

This time nobody tried to contradict him.

Chapter Twelve

By the time they reached the core of the mission-control area, they’d found eighteen dead males and three dead females.

All but one were from Stevenson. The exception was a skinny woman in a thermal vest, working jeans and high-laced combat boots. She’d been gut shot and looked as if it might have taken her a painful time to make the long day’s journey into night.

The survivors of the Aquila only recognized the name tag of one of the dead.

“F. Thursby.”

Thursby, a small man who’d had special responsibility for internal security, had been hit in the legs and then finished off with a single round through the back of the skull, blowing most of his face onto the floor.

“Poor old Floyd,” said Steve Romero. “Played a mean game of pool.”

All the bodies that they found within the complex looked as if they’d been dead for weeks, probably for months.

Apart from the corpses, there wasn’t much to see in the base. It had been utterly stripped and destroyed. Fires had been started in several places, some of which had smoldered harmlessly, while others had ravaged whole suites of rooms and offices.

Mission-control headquarters was one of the sections that had been totally destroyed by arson. The rows and rows of desks and comp consoles were fused into ugly tangles of blackened plastic and steel. “Nothing here,” said Kyle. “Nothing fucking anywhere,” snapped Jeff Thomas. “Nobody and nothing.”

Jed Herne picked up an overturned chair and sat down in it, rubbing at his knee. “No point going any farther, is there, Skipper? Just be a lot more of the same.”

“Our quarters. They had arma-steel security doors. So did the armory.”

“Why do we want the armory?” asked Pete Turner. “Sorry, that’s a dumb-fuck question, isn’t it? Sure. It was right next to the main stores area and our section.”

The stores had been sucked clean. Anything that could conceivably be eaten or drunk or worn was gone, swept away as though a voracious hurricane had howled through the long underground warehouses.

“Must’ve been a lot of folks to clear this much stuff away.” McGill sniffed. “Like a plague of locusts going through it. Mighty big gang of terrorists, wasn’t it, Jeff?”

But as they moved along, the journalist ignored him.

When they got to the last gloomy length of corridor leading to what had been their private quarters, Kyle Lynch reached out and flicked on a switch. To everyone’s surprise, a row of lights stuttered on, the neon buzzing in the ceiling.

“Nuke generator’s still working someplace,” said Mac.

There were more bullet scars in the curving walls, a perfect handprint, in blackened blood, and five more dead guards.

“It was a massacre,” said Steve. “Why didn’t they bring reinforcements to come and stop all this?”

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