Revelation (Shadowmark Book 4) Read online

  Revelation

  Shadowmark Episode 4

  Alex Bratton

  Revelation is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  2018 Antimatter Books

  Copyright © 2018 Alex Bratton. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  www.alexbrattonwrites.com

  Cover design by Dark Matter Book Covers

  www.darkmatterbookcovers.com

  License Note:

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from Amazon. Thank you for your support.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Author Note

  Also by Alex Bratton

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  A small town was nestled in the crook of the Appalachian valley, a typical one-road in, postcard-worthy haven of peace and tranquility. Dense, spring-green forest rose around it, covering the mountains in a blanket that was both sanctuary and menace. Despite the appearance of calm, Corporal Janie Crawford’s first real glimpse of civilization in months made her stomach tie into a familiar knot.

  Sergeant Fernando Douglas came up beside her, pausing to catch his breath after their grueling hike over the ridge.

  “Finally found something,” Janie said. “I thought we’d wandered into an episode of the Twilight Zone. They’d call this one The Never-Ending Forest.”

  “Why’d you have to say that?” Fernando asked. “Now I gotta check over my shoulder every five seconds to see if anything creepy is following us.”

  “I’ve already been doing that.”

  “Something look off to you?” he asked as he looked through his binoculars.

  “Yeah.”

  Janie and Fernando had left camp on Colonel Nash’s orders two days ago. Since then, they’d seen no one, which struck Janie as weird. Refugees were hiding in these mountains. Why hadn’t they found any?

  She couldn’t quite put her finger on the cold feeling that crept through her body, beginning in her gut and rising to her throat. Maybe it was fear that their mission was worthless, that they were the only human beings left on Earth. Janie shook it off and concentrated on the town below.

  No cars, but that was to be expected after the EMP.

  “That church is burned out, see?” Fernando pointed.

  The sleepy town had no signs of life. The church’s steeple was missing, and the white exterior was blackened around the windows. Nothing else was visible from this distance. Even with the sergeant’s binoculars, the trees hid everything from sight except the tops of buildings.

  “What’s the plan, Sarge?” Janie asked.

  “Gotta see if anyone is down there, don’t we? Orders were to make any and all contact.”

  Janie caught the sweat dripping from under her helmet and wiped the moisture off onto her loose pant leg. Her fatigues were woefully oversized. They hadn’t been two months ago when the aliens invaded. Fernando had lost weight too, along with the rest of their unit. Still, Janie couldn’t help feeling she’d lost more body mass than everyone else.

  She’d let grief consume her. The battle—no, the war—in her mind was breaking down her ability to make rational decisions. Every day became a little harder to cope with the turmoil there and the betrayal she’d committed.

  To the south of town, movement caught her eye, pulling her out of her brooding thoughts. “What’s that?” she asked.

  Fernando swung his binoculars over, and he grinned wider than Janie had ever seen. “Check this out, Corporal.”

  Janie yanked the binoculars out of his hand. Three, no, four green military vehicles were driving down the road toward the town. She let out an elated whoop.

  Fernando laughed. “How’s that for making contact? And they’re stopping!”

  “How long to get down there?”

  “Don’t know, but we don’t want to waste any time. Come on.”

  They left their lookout and plunged back into the forest. Excitement replaced the weariness Janie had been feeling. After days of hiking and months of seclusion, they were about to get answers. She wished they had a radio. As it was, they picked up the pace, sliding down the mountain as fast as they dared.

  In thirty minutes, they were halfway to the road, but the slope steepened, forcing them to slow and zig-zag down. All Janie wanted to do was hurry. Maybe things weren’t as bad as Colonel Nash had made them believe. Maybe the invaders hadn’t destroyed everything. Maybe in a few minutes, she would make the first phone call in months to her daughter Emily.

  Maybe Janie hadn’t really left her to die.

  The sun dropped behind the mountain, but twilight was long in this area. They’d still make it to the bottom before dark.

  A faint noise whispered through the forest like a harsh sigh drifting up from below. Janie halted beneath a tall tree, peering into the deepening gloom.

  Fernando came up behind her.

  “You hear that?” she asked. The cold feeling of dread returned, unbidden and stronger than ever. This time, Janie had trouble pushing it away.

  The sergeant’s eyes swept the trees as he listened. After a moment, he shook his head. “What was it?”

  Janie paused, listening again. “Nothing, maybe,” she said finally.

  “Could be the wind.”

  “Yep.”

  Fernando shot Janie a look. “Birds are quiet.”

  “Could be nothing,” she repeated.

  They plowed on, trudging down the slope over wet, rotten ground. The dread that had been building in Janie’s gut all day had now tightened into a knot she couldn’t ignore, weighing her down more than the seventy pounds of gear strapped to her body. As they walked, she scanned the trees again, watching for anything that might have made the sound she’d heard.

  Then, just ahead of her, Fernando froze, his body tense.

  Janie looked toward where he pointed, past a rocky outcropping and through a thick tangle of a waxy bush. Then, she saw a structure near a carpet of knee-high, broad-leaved plants.

  “Is that a house?” she whispered.

  “Two houses. Must be a road on the other side. Roads lead to town.”

  “Finally.”

  “No lights inside, candle or otherwise.”

  “No.”

  They exchanged glances. Fernando nodded, and Janie quietly found a path over the soft earth toward the first house. Fernando eased to the right, fading into the trees.

  Maybe we should announce ourselves, Janie thought, but something inside her held back. She waded through the thigh-high plants that led down to the back of the log cabin. The wet leaves had been trampled by something large. A bear?

  More sweat trickled underneath her helmet, tickling her neck. Janie raised her gun a little higher and forced the tension in her body to help her focus on her surroundings. When she reached the rear of the house,
she put her back to the gnarled wood siding and glanced behind just in case someone was watching.

  Damp tree trunks, green fronds, and an earthy smell greeted her. No one was there, and still, she felt exposed to unseen danger.

  The house’s back window was out of reach, but some odd black marks on the siding caught Janie’s attention. Burns, spreading out in a haphazard pattern like a bolt of electricity had hit the wall. Would a lightning strike look like that?

  Janie crept around the side of the cabin where the front door stood wide open. The hinges were intact, the handle unbroken. A chill breeze swept through and cooled the sweat beading at the nape of her neck, and the anxious knot in her gut tightened almost beyond endurance. After taking another look around, she walked up the stairs.

  This cabin looked different from the others they’d found. It wasn’t a vacation rental, but someone’s crude home. In place of sheetrock, heavy brown cardboard covered the walls. It had fallen away here and there, revealing dusty wooden slats beneath. All the wooden furniture looked handmade. The stone fireplace was darkened with soot. Janie felt like she’d just stepped into an episode of “Little House on the Prairie.”

  She paused at the hearth. A tendril of smoke leaked out of the ashes, drifting up into the chimney. Leftover embers glowed red beneath the ash.

  Either someone had just left, or they were hiding.

  Janie eased toward the only other room—a bedroom with a modern but shabby baby crib crammed up against the wall. A teething ring lay in the dust of the doorway along with a few rags that looked like pink baby clothes. The sight of the tiny clothes sent another pang of grief through Janie’s heart, stabbing her like a dagger.

  The half-open door blocked her view of the rest of the room. With a deep breath, Janie pushed it open. The rusted hinges creaked unmercifully loud, and Janie thought the noise had echoed outside. Knowing anyone in the room would have already heard her, she slammed the door back, hoping to catch someone hiding on the other side of it.

  It bounced off the wall behind with another loud bang, but aside from a lumpy mattress with dirty bed covers, the room was empty. Janie moved to the window.

  As she’d expected, the view was toward the rear of the cabin. Looking up from where they’d come, Janie appreciated just how steep the mountain really was. The plants she’d waded through really were flattened in places like something had hopped through, trampling the leaves as it went. Unless Appalachia had been hiding giant kangaroos, the only animal that would have made footprints like that wasn’t an animal at all.

  What had been here? Where were the inhabitants?

  She spied Fernando making his way through the undergrowth behind the house. He paused at one of the flattened patches, one she hadn’t walked over, and knelt. Janie unlocked the window and pushed up. The wooden frame stuck, so she put more force on it. When it finally popped free, it slid up with a grainy, creaking sound.

  Fernando was digging through the undergrowth, but he suddenly stopped and recoiled in disgust, holding his breath.

  A smear of blood covered the stalks of the plants beneath the top layer.

  He looked ready to puke. If the state of the plants was any indication, the body underneath probably didn’t look much like a body anymore.

  “Man or woman?” she asked.

  Fernando looked up at her with watery eyes. “Woman, I think. Crushed.”

  Janie glanced at the baby clothes on the floor and said, “I don’t think she lived alone.”

  The sergeant met her outside at the base of the stairs. His tanned complexion had turned ashen. “What would have done that?”

  Janie shook her head. She didn’t offer any opinions. She didn’t have any.

  “Burial?” he asked as if he’d forgotten he was in charge.

  She glanced back at the abandoned cabin. “Going to be dark soon, and whatever did that is close. Fire inside’s just gone out.”

  Fernando nodded and took the lead away from the cabin.

  The next house was smaller, dustier, and colder. They didn’t find any more bodies, but Janie didn’t really want to look. More than ever, she wanted to reach the safety of the town, wanted to find some normalcy to this day.

  She half-thought of searching for the baby, but she was afraid of finding it. The child had probably died somewhere in the weeds with her mother.

  The fearful knot in Janie’s stomach twisted further.

  For the rest of the evening, the only sounds they heard were the wind in the trees and the soft crunch of their own boots on the winding gravel road. They weaved back and forth with it through the trees. Where the road had washed out, huge gaps showed the foliage below like something had taken giant bites out of the earth.

  Their plan to reach the main road before dark proved overly optimistic. By the time they took temporary shelter under an overhang, the woods were pitch black. Neither wanted to sleep, so they took turns resting with their eyes closed and their ears tuned to every tiny sound.

  After a while, they talked about meeting up with the unit down below.

  “You think they have contact with anybody?” Janie asked. By anybody, she meant the world at large. Civilization. A miracle in which Earth had not been invaded by hostile aliens and cities destroyed.

  “Hope so.”

  “Do you think we put up a fight?” Their unit had been deployed to the mountains on a secret mission before the attacks started, and she really didn’t know what terrors had taken place in the cities, although they had heard disturbing reports.

  “I think we tried,” Fernando said. “From all the rumors, we didn’t have much of a chance.”

  “I would have fought.”

  “We all would have.”

  They sat in more silence a while.

  Fernando shifted positions and grunted. “You know,” he said, “sometimes I think about going to find my family.”

  Going to find his family meant desertion. Janie should have been shocked, but she wasn’t. How many times had she considered leaving?

  “Some of those recons won’t return to camp,” he said, continuing his thought. “You watch.”

  “Where are your kids?”

  “They were in DC, but there’s nothing left of that now. Their mother could have taken them anywhere when the towers landed. She wouldn’t let me see them at my last visit.”

  “Why not?”

  “She said I was a bad influence.”

  Janie snorted in amusement. “You?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t see what that has to do with it. The way I see it, I’m those kids’ father, ya know? It’s not up to her whether I get to see them or not.”

  “We all do what we think is best at the time,” Janie said, thinking of her own daughter. She’d done just that, but it had turned out to be the wrong thing. “If you’d known what was going to happen, would you have left them?”

  “I’ve thought about that. I don’t know, Corporal, I don’t know.”

  They were silent another hour, mulling over their thoughts, their decisions.

  “What about you, Janie?” Fernando finally asked.

  “I miss her.” Janie took a deep breath. “Do me a favor? If you decide to go find your kids, tell me.”

  “Only if you’ll do the same for me.”

  “Deal.”

  “You going to be okay?” he asked.

  “Are you asking if I’m going to flip out on you?”

  “Yes,” he said bluntly.

  “I’ve got your back, Fernando.”

  “Good to know. I’ve got yours, Janie.”

  After that, they didn’t speak anymore. Fernando settled back to try to rest. Janie felt comforted, a little. She wasn’t suffering alone.

  When rain began around midnight, Janie couldn’t help but wonder about the baby. Was she shivering somewhere, rain soaking her through? She squashed the thought. They would have heard the baby crying if she’d been alive and anywhere close. If her own daughter had been abandoned—

  B
ut Janie couldn’t think about Emily anymore, or the battle would rage in her mind all night. And yet, she couldn’t stop thinking about her.

  The aliens had invaded, and Janie, despite a desperate desire to get her daughter the minute the towers landed, had followed orders and shipped out with her unit. Now, months later, she was alone with Fernando, scouting, without knowing what had happened to her own flesh and blood. She’d abandoned her family for the promise of glory. And, after all the rumors of an alien invasion, she hadn’t even seen an alien.

  Anger and frustration were normal responses now. Anger at being stuck in this situation and frustration at being unable to do anything about it.

  That’s not true. Fernando’s right. We could leave.

  What if Emily were hiding somewhere—cold, scared, and starving? Would someone go back to look for her?

  Janie pulled off her helmet and ran a hand through her wet hair. The cool night air felt good on her head. It may have just been her imagination, but her mousy brown hair was thinner than it used to be, like her body. When she combed it, big chunks fell out. In the back of her mind, she thought it might have something to do with nutrition. They’d been out in the woods a while, underground, under trees, often in the dark. It didn’t have anything to do with her state of mind, the anxiety, the fear of the unknown.

  Janie dozed then woke to the sound of a baby crying. When she opened her eyes in the blackness of night, the crying stopped. She heard a sound like water far off. Then, the baby cried again, a fearful, heart-wrenching cry of distress.

  By morning, Janie had made up her mind.

  “Go back?” Fernando asked when she told him.

  “Go back.”

  “We’re on a time crunch now. Can’t afford to miss what’s going on below.”

  “I know, but it won’t take long. If you want to go on ahead, I’ll catch up to you.”