After Life by Dean Crawford

Author:Dean Crawford [Crawford, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller, Genetic Engineering, action, Post Apocalyptic, adventure
Publisher: Fictum Ltd
Published: 2013-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

26

Bayou La Tour

Louisiana

The dawn sky loomed over the bayou, the horizon awash with a flare of sunlight as the stars glistened overhead, lonely deep blue heavens above a lonely planet.

Marcus crouched with Kerry in a creek that hummed with insects, stagnant water filled with algae clinging to his boots. The air was cooler, in that it was breathable and did not scorch the lungs yet, but the temperature would soon rocket upward again.

Ahead, across a broad stretch of ground cleared long ago, was a dome–like structure with a satellite dish the size of a house mounted alongside it. The structure was silhouetted against the rising sun, mankind’s sharp and angular architecture crude against nature’s elegant wash of colour.

‘Can we make it?’

Kerry’s voice was soft on the morning air, partly for fear of being heard by real or imagined troops laying in ambush ahead, and partly because of her exhaustion. They had walked all night to reach the relay station in the hope of beating any intercept mission, but it was almost without doubt that the troops would anticipate this move.

‘We won’t know until we head out there.’

Like Kerry, Marcus had spent the last eight or so hours thinking about their plan, a sure chance to get properly paranoid. They were being pursued by trained troops, of that he was sure, but those troops would be weighed down by heavy suits and breathing apparatus. They could fly helicopters to search the bayou, but Marcus had heard no aircraft during the night.

That left only one possibility.

‘Wasps,’ he muttered. ‘They can’t hit the relay station with heavy weapons without disrupting the entire communications chain and defeating the object of stopping us, so they’ll come at us using Wasps.’

WASPS was the military’s acronym for Wi–fi Automated Strike, Paralysis and Surveillance drones. The size of a small bird, Wasps looked exactly like their insectoid cousins only much larger, louder and far more dangerous. Laden with all manner of micro–sized sensors, their most dreaded asset was a two–inch hypodermic delivery system, a sting in the tail that injected victims with a dose of either Pancuronium bromide for paralysis and later questioning, or a lethal toxin for when agony simply wasn’t enough to make the military’s day.

In the gloomy half light of dawn, Kerry’s features were taut and her eyes shadowed.

‘They’re automated,’ she whispered. ‘Too many stings and you’re dead no matter what happens.’

Marcus nodded, scanning the horizon. ‘The bayou’s big. They’ll send out plenty and hope to get troops out to us before we’re killed.’

Everybody had seen the news reports and the documentaries covering major assaults by the police when Wasps had been involved. Marcus could not shake from his mind an image of a criminal writhing in unimaginable pain as a swarm of glossy black Wasps stung him over and over until he was a bloated mess, blood pouring from his wounds as he thrashed himself into a cardiac arrest.

‘We should wait until it’s light,’ Marcus said. ‘Wasps work better at night.’

‘They’ve got infra–red, right?’ she asked.

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