Intruders: The Invasion: A Post-Apocalyptic, Alien Invasion Thriller (Book 1) (14 page)

Then someone did.

* * *

“ZEKES!” Wilson screamed from above us and, then screamed
again, the sound high and shrill.

My heart slammed in my ribcage. How many?

He screamed like he was being torn apart.

The voice of Ryder above me, “Go down! Go! There are a bunch
of them!”

Wilson had been the last in the hole. The deadies must’ve
seen him or heard him yell when he slipped.

“Down!” Mina screamed. “Go!”

We couldn’t fight them. Not down here.

Gunshots. Mina and Ryder were firing.

Kyle scrambled past me. “Zoe, go find another hole! We need
to get out.”

I lost my foothold and slid downward. I was being swallowed
by the cave, like I was in the esophagus sliding toward the depths of the
belly.

Find a hole to escape out of.

I kept chanting this in my mind, moving backward, my hands
and feet gripping the yellowed, hardened ground.

The hive flanked both sides of me. I looked into cells and I
moved downward, trying to find Kelly, but the people shoved into the holes were
older women, men, and boys in their teens.

I looked up as I descended, searching for an escape opening.

More shouts up from above.

Ryder was suddenly at my side, and Mina was directly above
me.

I moved quickly, the partially eaten people on both sides of
me pleading with their eyes, mouths opening and closing, or screaming silently.

Wanting to shut my eyes against the gruesome, horrific scene
around me, I looked down at the tunnel below me, frantically looking for an
escape route.

Finally the tunnel leveled out and I stopped moving
downward, and suddenly there were several trails to take. Without thinking I
took the right.

I crawled, my knees becoming raw beneath my jeans.

There was light ahead.

I was all but throwing myself forward now, my arms and legs
burning with the effort. The strange, sweet smell of the substance was cloying
in my nostrils.

And then there it was. An opening, only feet ahead of us.

I crawled and threw myself toward the filtered light in the
ceiling of the tunnel. My lungs strained for breath. I felt as if I was
suffocating.

The walls around me seemed to be turning. I was becoming
disoriented.

I was going to die down here.

With a shove from Ryder behind me, it was directly above us.

Ryder pushed me up, shoving me toward the exit, higher and
higher.

And then I was climbing up onto the frozen, white ground,
the snow falling onto my face.

Ryder came up next, only a moment after I hit the surface.

Next came Mina.

Ozzie.

Kyle.

Wilson didn’t make it out.

We were running, then. Running toward the compound as the
snow fell harder, coming down sideways, driven by a raging wind.

* * *

“The Zekes heard Wilson. Must’ve been wandering near the
compound.” Ozzie paced the floor, agitated. “Damn it!”

Kyle built a fire, and we sat around it, needing its heat.
The cold of the underground tunnels had seeped deep into our bones.

I looked up at Kyle, who squatted near the fire, eyes lost
in the flames. His face creased with worry. “What’s on the flash drive?”

He looked at me, his face momentarily blank. “I forgot about
that, Zoe.”

“What flash drive?” Ozzie asked.

Kyle dug the little blue flash drive from his coat pocket.
“One of the people in the hive. A man. He managed to tell me to look in his
pocket. In it was this flash drive.”

“Well, let’s see what’s on it.” Ozzie held out his hand and
Kyle dropped the flash drive into his palm.

Ozzie put the little flash drive into a USB port on his
laptop, which rested on the kitchen table.

I looked over at Sherry. “How is Logan doing?”

She gave a weak smile. “He’s doing better. His fever is
gone. His wounds are healing, amazingly.”

“Thanks to you,” I said. “I’ll go in and see him in a
minute.”

“I think he’d like that. He was awake a little while ago.”

“This guy was an anthropologist,” Ozzie said, reading a
document he brought up from on the flash drive. “Jason Barrows. Doctor of
Anthropology with the Lawrence Institute in Albany. He was some kind of
researcher.”

We gathered around the table, looking at Ozzie’s screen.

“Dr. Barrows was watching these things for quite a spell, it
seems. He first came upon them on a dig up in the Adirondacks. Apparently he
found the first hole a month ago.”

“Good of him to let the rest of the world know that we were
about to be invaded,” Mina said. “Strong work.”

“He went down there twice,” Ozzie said. “There’s no mention
of people being stowed in holes in the walls. But he does mention a hive-like
structure. Listen, ‘It would appear that the hive-live structure may be for
sleeping or hibernating purposes. The underground tunnels are both insect-like
and cave-like in design. The bones I found yesterday on my dig are like the
ones I found in Greece last autumn.”

These creatures are prehistoric, and insect-like in
formation but not in composition. These are definitely bones. They appear to be
of the Pleistocene era. They would’ve thrived in a glacial atmosphere. More
bones were laid out nearby. The proximity of the bones to others suggests an
ancient burial ground the creatures used. The underground trails and tunnels
I’ve discovered are fresh. These creatures had to have found a way to thrive in
warmer conditions their ancestors wouldn’t have tolerated. It seems they’ve
evolved. They’ve made a comeback.’”

“They lived during the Ice Age.” Ryder straightened, looking
at me. “But they’re back? What happened? When their food died off, they died
off?”

“Maybe,” Kyle said.

“Wait,” Ozzie continued reading. “He says they may have
continued to survive in glacial areas.”

“Like the arctic?” Sherry squinted at the screen.

“Maybe,” Kyle said.

“So these things hadn’t eaten or stored anyone at the time
Dr. Barrows wrote this,” Mina said.

“No,” I said. “They were preparing for it. Getting their
storage area ready.”

“There’s a link here,” Ozzie said. He clicked the hyperlink
and a slideshow appeared on the screen. Ozzie clicked the option to manually
operate the slideshow.

The first photo was of the bones Dr. Jason Barrows had
discovered on his dig in Greece. They were freakish and strange, and knowing
what we knew now, absolutely terrifying.

The bones were laid out on a white table. They were
insect-like. I counted four legs on either side of the body. The head was
elongated, the face turned toward the camera. The mouth was open to expose
three rows of razor sharp teeth.”

“Oh, my God,” Mina said.

“Those don’t look like the ones we’ve seen,” Ozzie said.

“Let’s look at the other pictures,” Kyle said.

Ozzie clicked to another shot. More bones, the same as the
last photo, but laid out on its back. The under belly of the thing was covered
in rings, similar to ribs, but without the space in the middle. “This shit is
out of a horror movie.”

There were nine more photos of the bones from the dig in
Greece, then photos of the bones he’d found in the Adirondacks. There were two
of the creatures, bones exactly the same in structure. The older bones were the
same insect-like structure as the newer bones. Similar creatures, but changed.

“There are similarities, but there’s no guarantee that these
are the same things that we’re dealing with now,” Sherry said.

“We may never know,” I said. “Dr. Barrows is stuffed in one
of their underground hives.”

“No one else knew about this?” Sherry said.

“This guy thought he had the find of the century,” Ryder
said. “He didn’t tell anyone.”

“Yeah,” Ozzie said. “He was thinking book deals, TV, and
movie rights. He didn’t want to share. He wanted to keep his little discovery
all to himself.”

Mina snorted. “Well, that was a bad call.”

“Yeah. He did have the find of the century,” I said. “Just
before they started eating us.”

Another night passed, but the scratching sounds were muted
by the storm outside. The wind howled; snow thunder split through the night.
I’d only ever heard thunder during a snow storm once before, when I was little,
and at the time I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Now it just made me
jittery. I didn’t know what was worse, being able to hear the crawlers
scratching and thumping against the windows and roof, or not being able to hear
them.

I wanted to look in on Logan, but knowing that these things
sense movement, I didn’t dare. Sherry slept on the cot next to him, so at least
he wasn’t alone.

Earlier, before the dark came, I went in to see him. He lay
still on the bed, eyes droopy from the pain killer Sherry had given him. He
lifted his hand slightly from the comforter, indicating that he wanted me to
come and see him.

The sharp smell of antiseptic only barely covered the sick
smell coming off of him. Although his fever had broken, the sweetish stench of
it still clung to him, despite Sherry sponging him off earlier.

“I think I might live,” he croaked. “But I don’t know if I’m
happy about that or not.”

“I know.” I patted his hand and sat on the bed next to him.
“But you are one tough S.O.B. So you might as well just get better and not
fight it.”

He smiled weakly. “I thought I was dead.”

“We all thought we were going to die when that horde came
through the door.” I was struck by how gaunt and haunted he looked. He could
easily be mistaken for one of the dead.

“What happened earlier? Sherry won’t tell me anything, and
it’s worse not knowing. Being left with my imagination.”

I doubted that. But I told him anyway. “We went underground
earlier. It went bad. Lost Wilson. He slipped. Shouted. A bunch of deadies
followed him in the hole.”

“Damn. I’m sorry to hear it. He seemed like an okay guy.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you see any crawlers?” His voice was hesitant, like he
wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

I shook my head. I wasn’t about to tell him about the half
eaten people stored in the holes of the underground hive. It was definitely a
tidbit he didn’t need to know about. It could still happen to him --- to any of
us.

He was getting better. But it would be a while before he
could fight against deadies or crawlers.

“Nope. I think we were driven out of that tunnel too soon.”

“Probably a good thing.”

I nodded and gave him a smile.

The absence of sound startled me back to the here and now.
The wind had died down, and all was silent. Mina was on watch, and as I looked
over at her, her gaze locked with mine.

“It’s daylight,” she said, but she didn’t look relieved.

We were going back underground today.

* * *

The snow fell thick and fast. It seemed like winter would
never end as we made our way out to the woods. Snowflakes fell on my cheeks and
lashes, and down the back of my neck. I wanted to put my hood on, but the hood
would obscure my peripheral vision. It occurred to me that if I lay down on the
ground right then I’d be completely covered in no time.

Which reminded me to keep a lookout for holes.

Judging from the hunched shoulders of everyone around me, we
all were dreading the second promenade into the underground tunnels.

Ozzie and Kyle decided that we’d try a different hole this
time, in hopes of finding one closer to where the women were being kept. They
chose a hole on the opposite side of compound, about a quarter of a mile away.

He stopped at the hole next to a large oak spray painted
with a red “X”, then turned to the group. “Everyone keep watch. We don’t need
any surprises coming through the snow at us.”

It was also his way of making sure we didn’t see what was on
the screen quite yet. He didn’t want us going down there blind, but he didn’t
want to prolong the dread we felt before going in, either.

We all kept our eyes to the woods around us. The snow was
falling so quickly now that it was hard to see within a ten foot distance. But
we squinted against the snow and peered into the woods, doing slow turns every
few seconds.

“Zeke.” Ryder pointed to an area somewhere to the left.
“Slow mover.”

It was a man wearing an orange jumpsuit. He slowly trudged
along the snow, arms barely moving at his sides. He spotted us, and he began
his slack-jawed journey our way.

“That’s prison wear,” Mina said. “He must’ve escaped while
being transferred or something.”

“Anything and everything could’ve happened when the shit
first began to fly,” Ozzie said. “Birchwood Prison isn’t far from here.”

Kyle nodded over toward the deadie. “The cold might be
making them slower, which is good, but it might make us reckless, too. Go on
and get him. Use your knife. We don’t need bullets drawing more of them.”

“Yeah,” Ozzie said, drilling a hole into the frozen ground.
“Let’s not have a repeat of yesterday.”

“You don’t think the sound of the drill will draw them?” I
asked.

“I’m already done. And the drill isn’t that loud. We need to
see what we’re heading into.” He laid the drill aside and began feeding the
camera and cord down into the ground, watching the screen with furrowed brows.

I watched Ryder as he approached the deadie. The deadie made
grunting noises and it stiffly walked toward him. He raised his arms and his
hands opened and closed as he shambled over the drifts.

When the deadie was only about a foot from him, Ryder
plunged his knife into the deadie’s eye, then stepped back, pulling the knife
out as the deadie dropped. He wiped the blade off in the snow, leaving gore
streaks on pure white.

Ryder’s face was devoid of expression as he made his way
back. He’s already killed enough deadies to be unaffected by it. I wondered if
I had, too.

Just last week we all had lives. Maybe not great lives, but
they had to be a hell of a lot better than the life we were living now. If you
could call it living.

Ozzie made a choking sound, and I swung my head around to look
at him.

The back of his hand was jammed against his mouth, his face
contorted into a mask of pain. He’d fallen back into the snow, and small,
silent sobs hitched in the back of his throat.

Kyle had fallen to his knees, the heels of both gloved hands
covering his eyes. He whispered, “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, no. No. No. No.”

We all stood frozen, staring at them.

My legs began trembling, and then tremors moved up my entire
body. I broke out in a cold sweat, and my scalp crawled. I breathed, “What is
it?”

Ozzie’s petrified gaze shot up to mine, and he shook his
head. “I can’t . . . I can’t fathom it.”

Kyle rocked back and forth, his shoulders shaking, still
whispering, “No, no, no, no.”

Ryder, Mina and I looked at each other, fear and dread were
plain on their faces.

With my heart drilling in my chest, I stepped over to Ozzie,
crouching beside him. I placed a hand on his arm, and slowly turned toward the
screen.

My heart stopped.

It was more horrible than my worst imaginings.

The scope camera had been dropped through the ceiling of a
breeding room.

Rows of women hung by their feet, naked in yellowish,
transparent, cocoon-like sacks, their eyes wide open, mouths yawning in silent
screams. Blood spilled over their shellacked foreheads and puddled onto the ground
beneath their heads. The yellow substance around their mouths had been burst
through. Holes marred the perfect varnish of the cocoon that had covered them.
Something had crawled out of their mouths. Something that had been inside of
them.

Suddenly I couldn’t get enough oxygen into my lungs. I fell
away from the screen, gulping at the air, making whimpering sounds deep in my
throat.

Then my entire being rejected what I’d seen, and I emptied
my belly onto the snow.

* * *

We stood around the hole looking at each other, like we
could find strength from the others, if just one of us found a way to pull it
together. Every one of us was trying to catch our breath. We’d all expected to
see something bad on Ozzie’s screen, but not one of us was prepared for the
horror only a few feet below us.

Finally, Kyle was able to form words. He leaned over, hands
on his thighs, looking up at us. “Did any of you recognize any of those women?”

We all shook our heads.

He straightened, with effort. His strength had gone out of
him, but he was fighting to get it back. “Then there is a chance that our loved
ones are still alive.”

We nodded, still stunned, but I don’t think any of us
believed that to be true. We hung on to Kyle’s fine, precarious thread of hope
because it was all that we could do.

I looked at Mina and found her wild, dark gaze penetrating
mine, and I knew what she was thinking.

What if we were caught? What if Kyle, Ozzie and Ryder were
stowed in the hive as food, and we were caught?

We’d be strung up and bagged, and implanted with alien eggs,
or however else they impregnated their prey, just like all the other women.
We’d hang there, upside down in a dark cave, waiting until the monster inside
of us slithered up through our throats and out of our mouths, killing us in the
process.

Dead people don’t bleed. Those women were alive when those
things crawled out of them.

I swallowed, and tried to slow my panicked heart.

Ozzie took a few breaths, walked a slow circle, looking up
at the sky, then turned to us. “These poor women were likely some of the first
to be grabbed. Kelly, Melody, Cassie, Marnie, Diane, and Penny may be in
another room somewhere. But we need to be prepared for the very real
possibility . . . likelihood, that they’ve been impregnated.”

No one said a word. We let his statement sink in.

Ozzie wiped the back of a glove over his mouth, then lifted
his hand. His voice had lost most of the conviction he’d shown before. “We get
in. We find them. We get them out. We deal with everything else afterward. Okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. The word stuck in my throat like a bone.

“Okay,” Ryder said, forcing more courage into his tone than
he felt.

“Got it. Let’s just get them out.” Mina placed her hands on
her hips. Her face had hardened, but her lips quivered slightly.

We were all scared shitless.

I felt my stomach clench at the idea of going down into the
tunnels again. It seemed that each discovery we made was worse than the last.

“Okay, are we ready?” Ozzie asked, his gaze shifting to each
one of us.

Everyone answered in the affirmative.

Ozzie gave a single nod. “I’ll go down first, then Zoe,
Ryder, Mina, and then Kyle.”

“Who is going to watch for Zekes?” Ryder asked. “It could
happen again.”

“I am.”

We all turned in the direction of the voice.

Sherry approached us in a snow white parka, a white, fuzzy
hat on her head. “I’m not letting you guys go down there without a look-out,
and you need every one of you to back each other up.”

“Logan okay to stay alone for a bit?” Kyle asked her.

“Yeah. He’s safe where he is.”

No one stated the obvious, which was that if we all died
underground and Sherry was overcome by deadies, Logan would likely die.

But then, we might lose us all if we were overcome by
deadies again while we were underground.

Six of one, half dozen of the other.

We didn’t have a lot of options.

“Thanks, Sherry,” I said.

“Of course,” she said. “Now get going. Get our ladies back.”

Ozzie flicked on the light on his hard hat and lowered
himself down into the hole, his handheld UV light clipped to his belt. He
paused. “As soon as the ground levels out, everyone get your UV light in hand.
Understood?”

We all nodded.

Numbness spread over me as fear clawed at my stomach. Dread
filled my chest and made it hard to breathe. I forced my legs to move toward
the hole as Ozzie disappeared into the darkness, the light on his hard hat
bouncing around the entrance to the tunnel.

My movements felt stiff as I tried to get a grip on my
panic. The roaring in my ears made it harder to coordinate myself enough not to
lose my grip and go sliding into Ozzie. The knowledge that we were heading into
a very real hell made me look up at the sky above us, certain that this would
be the very last time that I’d ever see the light of day again.

And worse, the possibility; the likelihood that Mina and I
could be trussed up and hung like the other females underground made death the
more desirable of the two evils.

Stop! Just stop! You have a job to do. A
mission to complete. Do it.

I followed Ozzie down further into the underground. The hardened
varnish-like, yellow substance was everywhere, keeping the dirt from caving in.

At least there’s that.

A powerful urge to laugh hysterically came over me, and I
shoved it down. Now wasn’t the time to lose it.

Oh, now is the time to lose it. If those
things get us, you don’t want to be lucid. No, not at all.

Still, I fought the urge and continued moving downward.
Every hand-hold, foot-hold, that led me further into the cave brought with it a
new level of dread and terror. I wished I was back at the college picking
cheerleader gum off my mop. Those were the good old days.

Those girls were almost certainly down here somewhere. I
didn’t want to see them.

I didn’t want to see any of them.

“Okay, Zoe.” Ozzie’s voice shook. “Here’s where it levels
off. The room where the girls are is behind me.”

I heard Ozzie’s deep intake of breath, preparing for the sight
we saw on his laptop screen.

Another couple of steps downward and the tunnel leveled off,
just like he said.