Dark Victory - eARC Read Online Free PDF Page A

you get the hell goin’. Okay? Woods are big enough for all of us, hunh? You do your thing, we’ll do our thing.”
    I sigh for their benefit, pull out my 9 mm Beretta, cock the hammer. Red beard laughs. “The hell you going to do, pop us?”
    “That’s right,” I say, and I shoot his friend in the leg.

    The sound of the report is sudden and loud, followed by black beard crumpling and red beard yelling. I step closer and aim the pistol at one head, and then another, and then back again. “I’m now ordering you to leave this military reservation immediately. Or under the current Martial Law Declaration, I’m authorized to use deadly force against you both.”
    The guy I shot is rolling side-to-side, hands on his right thigh, moaning, blood seeping through his clenched fingers. His friend red beard is standing still, hands empty. He looks over to the shotguns, looks to me. Thor growls. I guess he’s on a steep learning curve, because the guy doesn’t move.
    I say, “Are we through here, fellas?”
    Red beard says, “Yeah, we’re through here.”
    “Outstanding.”
    Keeping my Beretta trained on him, I reach to the side of MOLLE vest, tug open a quick-release, package dropping it into my hand. I toss it over to the two men. “First aid kit. Get your buddy bandaged up and get the hell out. Do you understand?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Then let’s make it more specific. Get the hell out, and if you hesitate, you go for those shotguns, you make any trouble for me at all, I drop you both here. Then I’ll complete my mission. Then I’ll tell my superior officer where to retrieve your bodies, if it doesn’t slip my mind.”
    The guy with the black beard groans. His friend reaches down, picks up the first aid kit. “Give me a couple of minutes to dress him before I kill the fire?”
    I step back, Thor at my side. “I’m a pretty level guy,” I say. “Sounds fair to me.”
    As he works on his friend, I quickly secure both shotguns, unload them both, and toss the shells into the darkness. With Thor I back away and go back in the woods, and looking back a couple of minutes later, the glow from the fire disappears.
    Glad to run into a couple of reasonable civilians for a change.

    Another hour of going humping through the brush, pausing and waiting, listening and watching.
    Nothing. Nothing at all.
    Thor stays by me, though sometimes he runs ahead or to the side, sniffling and poking about. The woods thin out some and it looks like we’re coming to a stretch of pasture. Open ground. Dangerous, but I’ll just poke around a bit.
    The woods are gone now, with a stone wall ahead of me. I climb over it and Thor covers it with one easy jump, and it’s a field all right, a field of hay. I look around and don’t see anything out of the ordinary.
    Nothing.
    Then I look up at the night sky.
    It looks to be on fire.

    I take a break, sitting back at the treeline, my back up against a big boulder, taking a healthy sip of cool water. Overhead the night sky is a mess of moving dots of light, and an occasional stream of sparks as something burns through the atmosphere. Time was the night sky was supposedly a peaceful place to look at the stars and planets and moon, and think sweet thoughts about the gentle universe and man’s place within it.
    For the past ten years, though, it’s been a battleground, and normal people hate looking up at the night sky, since looking up there every night tells them the truth, that we are at war, and were losing.
    I was only six when the Creepers arrived. From what I’ve later learned, their arrival was mostly ignored because of other, supposedly more important things that were in the news. Like a mom in the United States accused of murdering her teen daughter, a political scandal in Europe involving underage prostitutes, and a war bubbling in the Middle East between Israel and almost everyone else. The stories of scientists being puzzled by approaching objects that looked like comets but didn’t