X war infestation, p.22
X WAR: Infestation, page 22
The chime coming from the office clock snapped her mind back to the present as she heard dozens of footsteps. When the main door to the bathroom opened up once again and a gaggle of women came in, Ming replanted her feet on the tiled floor and flushed the toilet before opening the stall.
Sticking with the crowd, she kept low until they reached the elevators. She knew where the surveillance cameras were and Ming ducked and shifted sideways until she managed to insert herself into an alcove.
Looking up, she was glad to find the security camera positioned directly above her, which meant that she was effectively invisible for now. Her left hand slowly crept sideways, and pushed the button on the side panel.
Less than a minute later, the elevator door behind her opened up, revealing a barely furnished service lift. Ming slipped inside and activated the code on the security panel before wedging herself to the side of the interior.
The doors closed and the elevator began its descent. She knew that this particular lift was in the process of being rebuilt, and the cameras within had not yet been installed. The fear that had been gnawing at her had now been replaced by a suicidal determination.
Nothing is going to stop me from joining my brothers, Ming thought. If they want proof, then I'm going to give it to them, one way or another.
The elevator stopped, and the doors opened again, revealing a bare, unpainted service corridor. Ming stepped out and moved quickly down the passageway before she found a door labeled MAINTENANCE near an intersection. The entryway was unlocked, and she quickly went inside.
46 Nevada
GLANCING AT THE REARVIEW mirror above the car's windshield, Elsner could see that Piper and her brother were both asleep in the backseat of the Toyota Corolla he was driving. The call from Special Agent Smith had come the day before, and he had given Elsner instructions to take the two kids over to a solar farm in a remote area near Dry Lake Valley.
It had taken them all morning to get out of the snarled freeways of Los Angeles. After a stop for lunch in Barstow before they hit the state border, he continued to drive his passengers throughout the afternoon, and now evening had fallen. Figuring they would get food at their destination, he decided to continue on well past dinnertime.
Elsner's stomach growled as he tried to reach over to the paper bag lying on the front seat, only for his fingers to touch nothing but sticky used fast food wrappers. Damn it, I should have stopped at a drive-through to get something, he thought.
Now he was traveling down the desert highway and there were no nearby buildings in sight, just scrubland and elevated power lines out in the distance. The night sky seemed clear, and other than passing an occasional eighteen-wheeler truck, the road was all his.
Another ten minutes after making a turn up north to an adjacent highway, and he could see what looked to be a truck stop to his left just a few kilometers ahead. Elsner was about to slow down so he could get some grub when his cellphone started ringing.
Reaching into his jacket, he pulled out the device with one hand and answered it. "Hello."
Smith's voice was on the other line. "Hey, I'm here with our FBI team at the southern end of the solar farm. How far out are you?"
Elsner glanced at the open laptop's map application on the front seat. "Says here... we're just about a mile away, past the truck stop."
"Okay, there's going to be a gravel road to your right, just turn in there and head directly to where the generating station is."
"You got it."
"Speak to you soon."
Elsner placed the phone back into the inner lining of his jacket before looking up at the rearview mirror once more. "Hey guys, we're almost there."
The two youngsters at the back began to stir. Piper stretched her arms while yawning loudly. Derek looked out of the side window and said nothing.
"We're out of food," Elsner said. "But I'm sure the Feds will get us some grub once you're secured."
Piper leaned forward. "Where are we?"
Elsner turned the wheel slightly and slowed as the Toyota sedan drove down a dirt road. Massive rows of solar panel arrays were up ahead, like a crop of metal and glass growing out of the flat sandy gravel. "Looks like we made it, they ought to be waiting for us up ahead."
As the Toyota drove parallel to the main rows of solar panels, a dark painted Chevrolet Tahoe with tinted windows suddenly shot out from behind a nearby solar array and began to chase them.
Derek's voice seemed oddly calm. "You need to speed up."
Elsner gritted his teeth as the trailing SUV began to accelerate and bear down on them. "Just what in the hell is going on?"
"It's a trap," the boy said calmly as Piper slid back and put on her seatbelt.
Elsner was momentarily confused. "What? What do you mean it's a trap?"
Piper cursed. "What do you think he meant? The Etherians who are left are now going to try and kill us."
"But Special Agent Smith said—"
She cut him off with a hiss. "He had a gun to his head when he called you a few minutes ago."
"What? Why didn't you—" Elsner's words were once again interrupted when he heard a loud bang. He instinctively ducked lower, knowing it was a gunshot. "They're shooting at us—keep low!"
"Thank you, Captain Obvious," Derek muttered.
"Do something!"
"Okay, okay. Let them get a little closer."
The Chevy Tahoe got to within ten meters of the Corolla's rear bumper. Elsner cringed as the SUV began to pull up alongside them. As the Tahoe's rear passenger window began to roll down, revealing a man aiming what looked to be a shotgun at them, Derek held his palm up towards the other vehicle.
Elsner shouted a surprised curse as the Tahoe suddenly flipped on its side multiple times, the body of the SUV crumpling into itself until the vehicle collided with a batch of solar panels, completely demolishing the entire array.
No sooner had Elsner recovered from the shock than another Tahoe SUV darted out from cover half a kilometer in front of them and began charging closer with its headlights blazing, partially blinding him.
Piper turned to look at her brother. "Derek, can you do another attack this quick?"
The young boy grimaced as he rubbed his temples. "No, give me a minute."
Elsner twisted the steering wheel and the Corolla sped in between two rows of kilometer long solar arrays. Gunshots from the other vehicle began to shatter parts of the energy panels all around them. "Keep your heads down!"
The Toyota shot through the gap between the main arrays and headed towards the northern set of rows, with the pursuing Tahoe trying to speed up while maintaining a parallel course as it hurtled through the narrow gap in between.
Shooting past the end of the arrays, Elsner turned the car onto a road which led towards a series of outlying buildings with massive pipes and thermal chimney stacks, but the Tahoe once again gained on the Corolla. The relentless gunfire coming from the ones chasing them continued to pepper the back of the sedan with bullet holes.
A loud bang and the sounds of metal being dragged along the sand forced Elsner to slow down. "I think they shot out a tire."
Piper stayed low along the gap in between the front seats as more shots continued to ring out. "Try and get us in between those buildings."
Elsner bit his lip as he tried to accelerate, but the lack of traction from the flattened right rear tire had made the Toyota sedan slow and sluggish. "I don't think we'll make it in time!"
The second Tahoe began to close the distance, even though Elsner had floored the accelerator. The loose gravel and the flat tire were two factors he was unable to overcome as he managed to crash through the chain-link fence by the outskirts of the solar generating station.
Rifles and heads poked out from the open side windows of the Tahoe after it too blew through the fence. Elsner winced as he heard more gunfire, yet he kept his eyes focused on a gap in between two rows of buildings.
The driver's side window shattered, throwing bits of glass into the side of his face as he kept his eyes just above the dashboard. Elsner felt a stab in his left ribs, as if somebody had shoved an ice pick right through the car door and into his body. Piper screamed.
He gritted his teeth. The larger Tahoe loomed over the smashed driver's side window, and he could tell one of them was aiming a gun right at the side of his head.
Derek slapped his hand against the glass of his window. "Die, douchebags!"
Elsner was expecting to get his head blown off, but the Tahoe suddenly veered away, its driver apparently losing control as the entire vehicle began to shake uncontrollably before flipping into a freestanding lamppost.
The Toyota tore through the gap, and Elsner immediately saw a set of metal safety poles sticking out from the ground directly in front of him to protect the nearby electrical generator from collisions. He stepped on the brakes, but there wasn't enough distance as the Corolla's front bumper collided with the short but solid poles, and the sedan's entire hood crumpled a half second later.
HE MUST HAVE BLACKED out for a few minutes, because when Elsner opened his eyes again, he could tell he had been dragged out of the car and was lying on the ground, behind the side of a giant horizontal pipeline.
Elsner lifted his head and tried to sit up, but the pain in his side kept him just above the sandy gravel as he tried to get a bead on what was going on. Piper and Derek were crouching nearby, keeping behind cover as two men wearing tactical vests with FBI logos began running towards their position.
Squinting to get a closer look, Elsner gasped as he saw Al Smith trying to get away from another man pursuing him, only for the special agent to get shot in the back before falling down. Smith tried to crawl away, but his assailant just stood over him, took careful aim with an M4 carbine and shot several more rounds into Smith's body, killing him.
Turning his head, Elsner observed the other two assailants looking out for each other as they weaved in and out of cover while getting closer to his two wards. The third man, who had killed Smith, tried to approach from the opposite side, only for him to suddenly stop in his tracks and fall to his knees while crying out in pain as he dropped the rifle before placing his hands on the sides of his head.
One of the other men started firing at Piper, who shrieked while ducking behind cover. He could see Derek sitting in the dirt beside his sister. The boy's eyes were closed and he was shaking his head in an apparent attempt to recharge the power of his mind for another telepathic strike, but it seemed he could only affect the enemy one individual at a time.
The third man screamed one last time before his head exploded like a burst watermelon, spewing out bits of brain and bright crimson stains all around his still twitching body.
Elsner shook his head in despair as he saw a crying Piper cradling her brother's head. Derek had seemingly passed out; the constant use of his psionic powers was enough to incapacitate him, rending any remaining resistance moot. The two remaining adversaries began to circle their position slowly, as if still wary of more surprises.
Even though the pain on his side was debilitating, Elsner began to crawl towards the body of the third man. If he could just get to the carbine lying on the ground, maybe he could still do something.
But the distance was too great. The weapon was at least ten meters away, and he could barely slide forward a few inches at a time. Elsner turned his head and shouted out some curses, hoping to distract the two assailants and give Piper a chance to get her brother out of there.
One of the men turned towards Elsner and aimed a rifle at him. Elsner gritted his teeth, hoping he'd get instantly killed by a headshot to spare him from further misery. Just as the assailant began to pull the trigger on his rifle, the back of his head exploded in a reddish mist and he went down sideways.
Elsner's eyes opened wide as he saw two figures in all-black ninja suits suddenly pop out from nearby cover by the other end of the building. They quickly opened fire with silenced submachineguns at the remaining assailant, bringing him down.
A tall shadow loomed over him. Elsner looked up as he heard the sounds of a helicopter somewhere above the rapidly swirling sand being kicked up in the night air.
The man standing over him wore a hood hiding his face, and he was carrying a military rifle of some sort. "You okay?"
Elsner just had enough time to smile back and shake his head before he closed his eyes once more.
47 Ordos
MING WAITED UNTIL NIGHT fell again before opening up the maintenance panel and crawling out. She had slept most of the day in an unused engineering corridor, and now she was both thirsty and hungry. The blue maintenance worker's uniform she had stolen from one of the lockers was stained with grime and sweat, but she figured it would be enough of a disguise to find a way out of the city.
She looked around for a few minutes, trying to get a bearing on where she was. The well-manicured trees and the canals snaking around the grounds were an obvious indicator that she had surfaced inside one of the district's many parks. No one seemed to be around since the street sweepers who had been tasked to maintain this deserted plaza had already gone home.
From her vantage point at the rear of a closed boathouse that rented out plastic paddleboats for the park's artificial lake, Ming looked south and quickly spotted the newly built suspension bridge across the Wulan Mulun River. That meant she was near the city's center, just a few kilometers south of the Kangbashi District.
Reaching into the uniform's side pockets, she pulled out a glass flask and used the fading twilight of the early evening sky to examine its contents. The wormlike creature had curled up into itself, but its translucent spikes were still an obvious sign of its fantastical, otherworldly origins.
Ming quickly placed the flask back into the inner folds of her loose-fitting uniform. Recalling the dangers she had faced while wandering around the strange sublevel beneath the city the night before quickly drove her hunger pangs away.
It had been several hours of sheer terror wandering in an eerie, subterranean layer of tunnels. She remembered the glowing clumps of crystal that illuminated the place, like a dark fairyland culled from the deepest recesses of her nightmares.
She must have been lucky, for the area she had traveled through seemed deserted, and she hadn't encountered anyone until she found one room in particular, filled with hollow crystals, and of the horrors they contained.
When she had noticed movement coming from the glasslike materials, she had shuffled forward for a closer look, only to recoil in a mix of disgust and terror as she saw a near endless number of writhing mind worms crawling within the glasslike confines of their crystalline cages.
Ming sighed. The effort of capturing one of those abominable creatures had taken hours, but she finally managed to get one by breaking off a piece of the crystalline walls and trapping one of the worms just as it tried to crawl towards her.
She had spent the rest of that horrid night trying to find a way out of the place. Endless corridors of crystals had finally given way to more familiar concrete and steel walls until she made it into an unused stairwell that led out into a darkened, empty parking complex. As the sun began to rise she had staggered into some sort of underground maintenance shelter and immediately fell into an exhausted sleep before finally waking up again.
With the pall of night now cast over the lifeless park, Ming rubbed her tired legs before setting off. Erkin had made her memorize all the emergency dead drop locations, and she knew one was close by. Hoping that whoever was handling the whole mission would still periodically check for any correspondence in these places, she was sure it would be her best chance of success.
Situated along one of the park's well maintained plazas, a free-standing carved stone mural depicting a Mongol army in all its splendor had been erected along one side of the spot. Ming made her way closer, just behind one of the embedded floodlights on the smooth stone flooring.
Looking around, she checked to make sure no one was nearby before kneeling down and pushing at one of the granite tiles that was part of the mural's lower frame. The ceramic brick instantly loosened and gave way, revealing a small hollow behind it.
Ming took out the glass flask and placed it into the niche before putting the tile back into place. Shuffling over to one of the lights shining at the mural from the ground, she found and used a fist-sized rock to crack its transparent outer lens. This was the signal to her handlers that there was a package waiting for them inside the drop.
As she stood up and walked away, Ming felt a slight sense of relief. She had done her part, and now it was time to get out of there. A few minutes of walking brought her out into the sidewalk facing the street.
The six lane highway adjacent to the park also looked deserted. She didn't want to take any chances in case a police car came by so Ming hid herself and stood behind the trunk of a roadside tree. With the surrounding shrubs and the cover of night, she had a good chance of remaining unseen until she broke her cover.
After a few minutes, she saw a pair of headlights moving south along the road. Ming waited until it got closer so she could identify what kind of vehicle it was.
When she could finally see that it was a blue taxicab, Ming stepped out into the open and waved at it, only for the driver to miss seeing her as the car sped on by. Shaking her head in disappointment, Ming stepped back behind the tree and waited once more.
She heard the droning sound of a delivery truck before she even saw it. Stepping away from her spot to the edge of the sidewalk, she held her hands out and waved for a full minute as the vehicle slowly made its way closer and finally stopped by the side of the road less than two meters away.
Ming hurried over to the side and tried to look through the open window. Sure enough, the driver seemed to be an accommodating middle-aged man and he was alone. "Hey, can I get a ride from you?"
