Chapter 1 - CRATER
The armoured vehicle screeched to a halt in the middle of the ruined street. Axel Tanner had his fingers digging into the steering wheel the entire ride there—creating a sizable dent.
Figary's drone hummed somewhere above them, its rotors cutting through the misty-red air.
"I-I don't understand," Her voice carried through the comms. "Where are they?"
"Gone." His response was flat. "Same as last time, and the time before that."
He kicked the door open and stepped out, adjusting the rifle on his shoulder, his hazel eyes scanning the ruined street. Buildings on both sides had been gutted from the inside out, their walls collapsed and interiors exposed like cracked-open ribs. Fire still ate through the upper floors of the apartment complex on the left.
His boot stepped into something wet.
Yokri remains. The usual puddle of cold black goo.
Team Hawk had brought down a handful it seemed, but the casualties were more on their end.
Min climbed out after him and placed his box of medical supplies on the leather seat. "Guess I will not needing these."
Sable followed. Her amber eyes scanning the bodies scattered across the pavement.
"These attacks are becoming more coordinated."
With each passing day, it was becoming much more obvious that humanity was struggling to win this war.
"Axel." She called his attention to something Fig had alerted her to. Not so far from where they stood, there were sounds of laboured breathing coming from under a pile of rocks and dirt.
"Human? Or Yokri?"
"I'm not sure."
He placed his hand on the blade hanging on his neck. Sometimes, to fight the monsters when they were close… short range attacks were the next best thing. Min turned to the vehicle and grabbed his kit just in case it wasn't a Yokri.
They went over to the pile and started peeling away what they could of the rocks and metal until they stumbled on a large rock. The breathing pattern became audible now. It was a human's.
"Help me lift it," Sable whispered, getting her hands beneath the rock.
Axel stepped in, gripped the edge with both hands and threw it aside like it weighed nothing. They didn't call him Beast for nothing.
What they found beneath it made all of them go completely still.
Darrel Moss. Commander of Team Hawk and Axel's ex-bunk mate back in the army.
His tactical armor was shredded open across the torso and his upper body was barely intact. From the waist down, there was nothing. His legs had been severed cleanly from his waist. The talon marks across his neck were deep and blood spurted out from them like a fountain.
Axel dropped to one knee.
"Darrel. Buddy…" He didn't know what to say.
Darrel's eyes moved. Blood ran from the cuts across his throat the second he tried to force a sentence from his mouth.
"They came… they came fast, we didn't see them, we were outnumbered a-and overpowered. Five minutes was all it took and we were done for." More blood leaked from the cuts. "We failed—"
"Don't talk." Axel pressed one gloved hand to his mouth. "Min," he turned to the doctor. "Administer first aid to him while Sable brings the stretcher."
"No!" Darrel's wounded hand came up to grab Axel's. "First aid won't do anything for me. I don't want to die on the way to some clinic, I want to die here, right where my team did."
"This is not the time to quote some heroic bullshit line from a high grossing action film. I am not letting you die here."
His hands worked fast. He collected the towels from Min and pressed them against his neck. "Put pressure on the cuts Darrell. We will cauterize what exposed flesh we can."
"If I don't die of drastic blood loss, then I'll die of suffocation." His breathing became less hurried. He was giving up. Axel nearly slapped the towel across his face.
"Darrel! Breathe. Breathe. Breath damnit!" Min took out an oxygen mask from the tool kit and handed it over to Axel who pulled on the strap—preparing to fix it on Darrel's mouth area. But it was of no use. Darrel wasn't listening and there was nothing they could do to make him.
In less than thirty seconds, he went quiet.
A nasty feeling gathered in Axel's chest. He put a shaky finger under Darrel's broken nose. There was not a single puff of breath. His finger stayed there longer than it should have, still hovering under his nose despite the absence of breath. The oxygen mask clattered to the ground when the realization dawned on him.
Darrel Moss had died—right in front of him, and there was nothing he could've done to stop it.
___________
The weather mirrored his mood.
The moment Axel stepped foot back into the base, even the devil himself could feel the storm in his chest.
"Axel? Where are you going?"
He grunted a half response of nothing.
"To be alone."
He pressed the button and the metal door closed before she could follow him.
The last thing he needed was recycled cliché lines of consolation.
Sable meant well, he knew that. She had spent the better part of two years trying to reach him one way or another, whether it was food left outside his door or offering up herself to him. He had never taken either. And right now, with Darrel's blood still drying on the knee of his pants, the last thing he wanted was someone telling him it was not his fault.
He knew exactly whose fault it was.
He was sick of driving up to mission destinations full of dead SPECTRA agents. He was sick of having to watch the chief hand out black letters informing the families of the fallen of their demise in service. Every single one of these letters existed because of the alien monsters that decided to leave their atmosphere and invade Earth's.
He would kill every last one of them if he could.
Most of all, he was sick of the lab's slow progress.
The metal doors pinged and slid open to the workroom. Figary hurried past him into the loading bay the moment he stepped inside, her tablet tucked beneath one arm and her black curls disheveled from running around the base all afternoon.
"Axel," She adjusted her glasses on her nose bridge. "I'm really sorry, Darrel was a great guy, he… didn't deserve to die like—"
He brushed past her before she could finish.
Bosco was leaning against the wall near the far side of the room. He had been with Fig the entire time, watching everything unfold through her system screens. He was the last person drafted into Team Alpha and he hadn't known Darrel long enough to know his history with Axel. But one look at Axel's face was enough to know that some emotional damage had been dealt.
"Dr. Reyno." Axel's eyes scanned the room. "Where is he?"
"He is in the lab downstairs, I think."
He moved past the other agents, took the stairs and descended to the laboratory downstairs.
Dr. Mathias Reyno was SPECTRA's head scientist and the closest thing this operation had to a backbone. He was currently hunched over a petri dish filled with something that looked like ash covered in amino acid—placed firmly on the stage of a microscope. He turned around when he heard footsteps behind him.
"Oh, Commander Tanner." His smile faded when he took a look at Axel's demeanor. "What has your balls in a bunch today?"
As usual. He was too busy to watch the mission live on the screens.
"What has my balls in a bunch, doc? I'll tell you what has my balls in a bunch. We failed another mission and this will be making it the third one this month. By the time we arrive the Yokri's aren't even retreating, they are already gone." His voice dropped an octave. "You're in here every day, all tech and science and still… your alarms can't even alert us of the attacks at the right time."
The doctor's eyes were wide. He wasn't expecting another mission failure again.
"This was the shortest hit they've pulled off and yet the most damaging. The entirety of Team Hawk were wiped out like chickens. Darrel Moss was the only person who still had his head intact."
Dr. Reyno was hopeful for a second. "He made it?"
"No, doc. He did not. His head might've been intact but his lower body wasn't and by the time we got there, he… the blood loss, the corrupted oxygen… the multiple talon wounds. He couldn't hang on any longer."
The dark-haired scientist pressed his hand to his lips and shut his eyes for a moment.
"Golly, Axel… I'm gravely sorry about your friend."
"It isn't just him. It is every black letter that gets handed to a family because we have made no progress. We are losing this war. And if we do not do something fast then these creatures will fuck us over."
"We are trying our best out here. But without a live specimen to study there is only so much that we can do. There is no way to identify their biological weaknesses, their anatomy is designed to self-destruct on capture and the dead ones disintegrate to goo. We have nothing to work with here."
"So we are just sitting ducks until the next attack?"
"This is no fault of the lab, Axel. I understand your grief but—"
"No, you don't. How could you possibly understand it when it wasn't your friend you watched die today?"
"My niece was among the casualties of Team Siro last week."
Axel pursed his lips.
"I didn't know."
"That is because you weren't around. You were in the gym while the rest of the team were in the leisure room consoling Figary for the loss of her cousin. Look, soldier. This apocalypse has touched nerves in most of us one way or another. But everyday we show up and we never stop trying despite the failure, despite the demoralizing grief. It is not easy on anyone in the lab, but until we figure out a way to bring in a live specimen—all we can do is push forward." He carried his note tablet from the table. "Maybe if we rotate our patterns of arrival, we could—"
The boom hit them without warning. It was a single enormous impact that shook the entire base down to its foundation. Test tubes and beakers flew off the counters and shattered across the floor. Axel and the doctor had to grip on to nearby tables to maintain their balance.
In less than eight seconds, it stopped as suddenly as it had started.
"What was that?" Mathias questioned, panicked.
Axel was already rushing back upstairs to the workroom to find out.
Figary had both hands braced on the edge of the system desk. Bosco had grabbed the door frame. Sable and Min were pressed against either side of the elevator doors, holding the frame. The rest of the agents in the room were half on the ground and half holding something.
"What was that? A bomb?"
Figary shook her head. "There was no explosion, it was more like something hitting us hard, a bomb without uh… the explosion. If that makes any sense."
"Pull up live feed from the perimeter cameras."
She nodded and turned to the control panel—punching some buttons. The screens came on but they were grainy and unclear. She pressed the buttons again and the same thing happened.
"Ah… all the receptors seem to be down."
He was already heading for the elevator. Sable half-ran behind him. The moment the doors opened, they caught sight of the chief striding out of his office with three agents flanking him by the side.
"Chief Korvan." Sable called out to him. He halted and turned to them. "Agent Navarro." He nodded, then turned to Axel. "Axel."
"Chief, you felt it?"
"I think everyone in this building felt it."
"Have you been able to get any footage?"
"My perimeter cameras are down. I was heading out to assess the situation myself."
Simultaneously, the voice announcement system came on.
"A foreign object has breached the base perimeter. All personnel are to remain inside. The first responder unit will be deployed immediately to assess the breach at close range."
The first responder unit filled out of the hallway, fully geared and suited up. The chief adjusted his tie and tucked his hands in his pockets. They hadn't realized when Axel slipped away and joined the line of first responders. By the time the chief and Sable noticed, he was already out the door.
"Tanner!"
"Axel!"
He heard them, but when his eyes landed on the impossibly large crater in front of him, he couldn't bring himself to go back inside. The response team was taken back by the size of the crater, it obviously spooked them and they hesitated. Axel jumped and landed in the middle of it before anyone could say 'jack'.
The moment his boots hit the loose soil—his hand dropped to the blade at his holster. A figure was curled on the ground, completely still. The closer he got, the more confused he was. It was large, long-limbed, dirt covered and disturbingly humanoid. A gasp left his lips when Axel discovered that it had hair. Long, dark hair with glowing red highlights.
"The fuck?"
For something that had fallen from that height.
It was far from dead.
