Northern British Columbia,
Six years after the Culling
Alex Benoit lay motionless in his hide—a one-foot-deep trench covered by a thermal shield tarp and fresh foliage—and peered through the two-inch slit at the kill zone a hundred meters to his front.
Two rifles sat within reach—a 5.56mm Special Operations Forces Combat Assault Rifle-Light, a SCAR-L, and a Pneu-Dart X-Caliber air rifle. Also close was the “clacker,” resembling but far deadlier than an oversized industrial-strength stapler.
Something with far too many legs crawled over the back of his hand, but he ignored the urge to brush it away, just as he had countless other times in countless other tactical hides throughout his life. He and the other rangers had set the ambush up late last night and had been lying, nearly motionless, for hours. It had been drizzling for some time now and would probably continue for hours yet, but the sky was turning gray with the coming dawn. He switched off his miniaturized night-vision goggles, pushed them atop his forehead, and let his eyes adjust to the dim. Even the best night-vision technology created a tunnel-vision effect and made shooting difficult. As he scanned the terrain ahead of him, he absentmindedly rubbed his short beard.
Their kill zone was a fifty-meter length of what had once been Beattie Drive in Hudson’s Hope, the main drag of the little northern British Columbia town. But the road was barely recognizable now. Vines and weeds choked the rusted-out remains of abandoned cars. New growth, even small trees, had ripped their way through the asphalt, and years of winter freeze, a long-broken water main, and neglect had completed the destruction. The wilderness had reclaimed Hudson’s Hope almost entirely. Thick vines, grasping weeds, and sprouting trees grew over, under, and through the buildings, breaking glass and ripping apart walls, letting in the rain, which wreaked further havoc, causing most of the homes to sink back into the earth, leaving little behind but broken shells, now overgrown by brush.
One building remained intact, though. At the far left of the kill zone sat the Hunter’s Inn and Minimart, a brown brick complex housing motel dwellings, a small grocery store, and a sporting goods shop that had once sold hunting supplies—preserved food in cans, warm clothing, sleeping bags, tools, and most importantly for the Remnants, guns and ammo. There had always been a surplus of hunting rifles in northern British Columbia, even after the dark-elf massacre of Fort St. John. Without people, those weapons now sat rusting. The Remnants might have been monsters, but they weren’t stupid, especially the dark elves. They understood all too well what happened when swords and spears went up against firearms. For reasons no one knew, the Remnants had stayed in the north rather than moving south where the temperature was far more survivable. In the last six years, they had learned how to survive, but to keep surviving they needed the weapons, ammo, and supplies in that building.
Setting them up perfectly for an ambush.
As if by magic, a lion appeared on the street, right within Alex’s arc of fire. It stepped out from between two abandoned cars, its head held high as it sniffed the cold northern air. Alex held his breath as the lion—a female, he thought—turned to stare at him, its yellow eyes flashing in the pre-dawn light. Male or female, it had to weigh hundreds of pounds of raw muscle. Another lion joined the first, another female, then two more, all moving with remarkable grace. There was a pride in the area, he knew, at least a dozen adults with twice as many young, but the rangers rarely saw them this closely. As with the Remnants, he didn’t know why they hadn’t migrated farther south, but he was glad he had left Larry, Curly, and Mo with the vehicles—the dogs were too loyal and brave for their own good sometimes. The first lioness was still staring at him. Sweat rolled down Alex’s face as his fingers drifted closer to the SCAR-L. But the lioness looked away, her nose lowered to the ground. It was entirely possible she knew he and the others were watching them and just didn’t care. In a world without people, the lions were near the top of the food chain.
And then all four lionesses froze, their posture stiffening, their heads held high. After several seconds, they turned and bolted into the wilderness. Lions still feared something after all—hellhounds.
The earpiece in his AN/PRC-148 Multiband Inter/Intra Team Radio, his MBITR, chirped once. He knew in a moment it was Dallas, tasked with the right-flank security. As expected, the Remnants were coming from the east, from the Peace River. Four more clicks followed as Sammy, Henry, Anjie, and Bekka—each lying in their own hide on either side of Alex—acknowledged Dallas’s warning. The Sanchez brothers, Royce and Gracie, the support group, who were hiding in the second-floor remains of a still-standing church across the street from the Hunter’s Inn and on the far end of the L-shaped ambush, clicked twice to indicate they were ready to go hot with the light machine gun. Alex activated his transmit button three times—the agreed-upon code for “shit’s about to get real.” No one would speak, not even a whisper, over the radio. They were expecting a Remnant scavenging party—probably only boggarts and hellhounds, maybe a troll—but there might be dark elves leading them, and the elves could hear a mouse fart from a hundred feet away.
He picked up the air rifle and opened the chamber for the CO2 tank, threading it onto the O-ring until he heard the hiss of charging air priming the weapon. Then he slid the dart into the ammunition chamber within the stock and rotated it back into place, readying it for firing.
A lifetime ago, he had used a rifle like this to capture a basilisk.
He was too old to do stupid shit like that anymore.
Alex took aim down the weapon’s scope as the enemy moved into sight from the right. A pack of four hellhounds strode down the street, heading toward the Hunter’s Inn. He set his crosshairs on the last of the monsters, an obscene cross between a hyena and a wolf the size of a small pony. Adrenaline surged through his blood, increasing his heart rate. Alex hated hellhounds. They were bad enough without the fire-breathing shit.
All four beasts padded past, sniffing the air.
He inhaled and exhaled slowly, letting the crosshairs rise and fall on the animal’s furry rear quarters, near the long black tail. He needed to put the dart somewhere the beast couldn’t reach it—or others couldn’t see it, and Alex doubted anything, especially an elf, wanted to look at a hellhound’s butt. He squeezed the trigger, and the weapon jerked. The hellhound yelped in pain, leaping into the air and spinning about, snapping at the closest beast. It snapped back, snarling, but they separated, choosing not to fight. The shot had been good. The barbed tip on the dart should keep it in place. If not, they had wasted all this time and effort. Well, mused Alex, not a complete waste if we get to kill Remnants. He set the air rifle down and picked up the clacker.
The four hellhounds moved farther down the street, out of the kill zone. The boggarts appeared next, a dozen of them carrying hunting rifles with their muscular outer arms while leaving their much smaller inner arms dangling, like aquatic T. rexes. With their bald black heads and saucer-like fish eyes and gills running down their throats, they looked like the freakish offspring of an H. P. Lovecraft nightmare. Some wore the remains of their leather and chain mail armor, but most now wore thick layers of human clothing—anything that could keep them warm. He wasn’t pleased to see they all had hunting rifles. Years ago, only the leaders carried firearms, but those days had passed. Luckily, boggarts had depth perception issues and were lousy shots, but they could always get lucky. Behind the boggarts were two massive tusk-mouthed trolls, each at least eight feet tall and five or six hundred pounds of gristle, fat, and muscle. Each troll carried a three-foot battleax over its wide shoulders. Troll fingers were far too large to operate human weapons.
Alex primed the clacker, waiting for the boggarts to enter the kill zone. The hair on the back of his neck rose, and he froze—three dark elves trailed the trolls, and one of them was a female.
Shit!
Not all females were mages, but all the mages were female. His pulse raced, and he forced himself to be calm. Even if she was a mage, he was in no danger. Besides, they had Bekka.
He squeezed the handle on the clacker, sending a three-volt pulse through the buried firing wire leading toward the M18A1 claymore mine facing the kill zone. The mine detonated with a bone-jarring roar, shotgunning hundreds of tiny steel balls in a sixty-degree arc that shredded the closest boggarts and one troll. The hellhounds froze in terror. A second later, Gracie and Royce opened fire with the light machine gun, a next-generation weapon firing belt-fed caseless 7.62mm ammunition. From their elevated position, they sent a withering barrage of machine-gun fire down the road, walking the tracers over the entire length of the kill zone. Although neither brother had prior military experience, they possessed a natural gift for firearms, notably sniper weapons and machine guns, and sprayed death with practiced ease. As expected, the hellhounds, having been spared the claymore and machine-gun fire, bolted away in fear, disappearing into the woods. The brothers kept firing hundreds of rounds in long bursts, the practiced “mad minute” of a professional ambush. As abruptly as it had started, the firing stopped. The barrel of the machine gun was no doubt red hot by now.
“Lay it on!” Alex said into his radio. He picked up his assault rifle and began shooting. The others opened fire as well with heavy but accurate shots into the kill zone, firing in their predetermined arcs at anything that still moved.
Alex let them shoot for about a minute before keying his radio once more. “Cease fire. Cease fire. Watch and shoot. Watch and shoot.”
The gunfire faded away, and silence settled over the dawn. Acrid smoke hung in the air over the kill zone. Someone fired on his left, three quick shots in rapid succession, then stopped. Two more shots echoed across the kill zone, this time coming from the right. Alex saw nothing moving within his assigned arcs, only corpses, so he held his fire.
He waited an additional two minutes. No one fired. He keyed his MBITR. “Assault team, move now!”
Alex burst out of his hide with his assault rifle already tight in his shoulder and began to walk forward. To his left and right, he heard the rush of movement as the others surged out of their own hides to advance in-line with him. One of the troll corpses might have moved, so Alex double-tapped it, sending two aimed shots into the center of visible mass. The corpse lay still. On either side of him, the other rangers fired, each time with two aimed shots. Alex and the others moved forward through the kill zone, stepping over bodies and pieces of bodies, putting aimed shots into the carcasses. The all-too-familiar smell of cordite, blood, and feces was overpowering, and his heart pounded, his breathing rushed, but within less than a minute, they had moved past the kill zone, reaching the predetermined limit of advance, the LOA. They regrouped, kneeling in a circle, weapons facing outward. The rain continued to patter, hissing and turning into steam where it struck the hot barrels of their rifles.
“Sound off!” Alex called out, kneeling and watching his own arc of fire.
One by one, they reported their status. All five were with him and uninjured. One at a time, they carried out a quick combat reload. He keyed his radio. “Support team, call it?”
His radio chirped in his earpiece, followed by Royce’s excited voice. “Fire doggies lit out, jefe,” he said with his thick Spanish accent. “Nothin’ moving in the KZ. I think we got ’em all.”
“We got a signal?”
“Five by five. Hightailing it north mucho quickly.”
Relief coursed through Alex. His glance fell on Bekka, a thin young woman in her thirties who looked both out of her element and strangely at peace as she peered over the barrel of her weapon. “Anything?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head, her long brown hair tied up tightly in a bun. “Clear. Maybe the claymore took her out.”
The dark elf woman had been a mage. This scavenging mission must have been important to the Remnants.
Alex shook his head. “Maybe is not gonna cut it. We need a corpse.” He scanned the corpses on the road. Bekka’s sense of magic use was spot on… not as good as Cassie’s, but she hadn’t let them down yet. “Okay, we’ll do one sweep then light out.”
“Do we have time?” asked Henry, his voice tight. “If there are more…”
“We’re making the time.”
Henry swallowed but nodded. Henry Hill was a big, tough man, a six-foot, two-inch, two-hundred-plus pound brute. With his good looks, rugged features, and squinting gray eyes, he looked like a movie-star action hero from an old cowboy movie. But despite appearances, he was also the least experienced fighter on the team. Before the Culling, he had been an accountant, probably a good one—Henry was meticulous. Now he was a fair ranger, if a touch nervous. But nervous kept you alive in the north.
“One sweep, people.” Alex repeated as he rose.
The others surged out in-line again, facing the kill zone once more. They moved forward more cautiously this time, no one firing, but scanning the still-smoking carnage. Many of the corpses were missing limbs or heads. Others had gaping holes in their torsos. The dead faces all looked mildly surprised. His eyes took in one of the dark elves, a male. A bullet, probably from the light machine gun, had shattered his head, and the elf’s golden eyes bulged on either part of the wound, his long white hair glistening darkly with blood and brain matter.
“Hey, boss,” Dallas called out. “We got a live one here.”
Alex joined the diminutive Asian-American, who stood guard over a wounded boggart warrior. Michael “Dallas” Lee had been a former cook in the US Army and a member of the task force quarantining the dark-elf incursion in the Sonoran Desert just before the Culling, finding shelter within its Null Zone, the two-hundred-kilometer safe zone around the dark-elf retransmission towers. Dallas was the second-in-command of the Doig River Ranger Team. Unlike Henry, Dallas was a small man, quick to crack a joke but as hard as nails and as tough as any Tier-1 Special Forces operator whom Alex had served with.
Alex joined him, surprised to see a survivor. Then he realized this one would not make it. The fish-faced warrior sat back against the rusted side of a Dodge Caravan, arterial blood spurting from the stump of one of his—its—inner arms growing from the center of its torso and the chest wound just beside it, soaking the blue down hunter’s vest and a thick wool sweater. The boggart watched Alex with its bulbous black eyes, each the size of a baseball. Its wide fish mouth, filled with double rows of pointy teeth, opened and closed, bloody spit bubbles popping as it tried to speak.
“Lung must be pierced,” Dallas said. “Are their lungs in the same place ours are? Do they even have lungs?”
“They have lungs but much bigger than ours.” Alex slung his rifle on his shoulder and drew his short sword, Witch-Bane, from the black leather sheath Leela had made him that he wore on his belt. He dropped on one knee, positioning his sword point over the boggart’s main heart, just between the two smaller ones.
The boggart redoubled its effort to speak, this time succeeding. Its voice, almost a whisper, was a sibilant hiss. Its remaining inner arm jerked. Alex answered the boggart in Empire Common, the language spoken by all creatures within the Fae Seelie Empire, then he drove the short sword into the boggart’s heart, killing it.
As he cleaned his blade on the boggart’s vest, Dallas looked away and spat chewing tobacco onto the ground. “Creeps me out when you talk to them.”
Sammy joined them. Sammy was a native, a member of the Dane-Zaa Beaver people. He and his cousin Anjie were the only two members of the team who had been rangers before the Culling, having been members of the 4th Ranger Patrol Group. Sammy had been one of the few survivors from the Battle of Taylor Bridge. “What did it say?”
Alex let his blade hang by his leg. “Same thing they all say: please don’t.”
“Hey, boss!” Bekka called out. “I count two dead elves, both male.”
Alex saw Bekka standing over another dark-elf corpse. A chill ran through him. Even from where he stood, he saw the dead elf was male, a warrior with a shotgun and a long curved saber on his hip. His gaze swept the other corpses. “Eyes sharp, people. We’re missing a female.”
The others dropped to a knee, aiming in all directions.
Alex decided in a moment. “Screw the sweep. We’re moving now.”
He took only two steps when Witch-Bane’s red metal blade pulsed and glowed crimson. Then the air before him shimmered, and a dark-elf woman, the missing mage, appeared out of thin air, her invisibility spell vanishing. The dark-elf woman’s yellow eyes widened in surprise, and she stepped back, thrusting a hand at Alex.
“Channeling!” Bekka yelled from behind him at the same moment that the dark elf cast a torrent of fire, like a flamethrower. The flames enveloped him, and for a single heart-stopping moment, he feared he’d burn. But as always, the flames evaporated into sparks instead.
The rest of the spell, however, roared past him, and Bekka screamed in torment.
He slammed into the mage, ramming Witch-Bane into her stomach with both hands, puncturing the rings of the black chain mail armor she wore and impaling her. Her golden eyes opened wide, and she coughed blood into Alex’s face. He yanked up the blade and sawed through her from stomach to sternum. Her blood splashed over his vest and hands, and she fell dead. He turned to see Bekka, wreathed in flames, spinning and flailing at the air just before Dallas rammed into her with his shoulder, knocking her down. He and Sammy rolled her in the wet ground, beating at the flames with their hands while Bekka screamed. Alex joined them as they beat out the fire.
Her hair was gone, flash-burned away, as was much of her skin, leaving red weeping sores. Sadly, they were all too familiar with these types of wounds. They undid her clothing, searching for jewelry to remove before her skin bloated, but Bekka was no fool and wore none. Her breathing became wet and raspy, her moans pitiful. Alex injected her with two ampoules of morphine and placed a wet gauze wrap over her face, leaving her burned mouth exposed so she could breathe.
“Oh hell,” said Sammy, stepping back. “This is bad.”
“I know,” said Alex, sitting back on his heels and considering what to do next.
“What are the chances?” asked Henry from nearby, anguish in his voice.
“What are the fucking chances, the only mag-sens in the north?”
“No, she’s not!” Alex snapped. “Pull yourself together.”
Anjie joined them, kneeling beside her friend and holding her burned hand. She looked at Alex, her glasses reflecting the still-burning fires. “What do I do?”
“Just be with her. Let her hear your voice.”
Royce and Gracie skidded to a halt on their hybrid-electric motorcycles, the only sound coming from the drive chains and stones crunching beneath their tires. Royce had slung the light machine gun over his back, and he kicked up the stand before jumping off and running over to Alex. “Damn, jefe. What happened?”
“Mage. She survived the ambush and turned invisible. Pure luck I wandered into her when I did. Otherwise, she might have had us all.”
“All but you,” said Dallas, which was true enough… if a bit cold.
Gracie swore, staring at Bekka, his dark Hispanic skin blending with the dim light, making his eyes shine. The brothers were so alike they could have been twins, but Gracie was two years older. Good looking, athletic, and quick to smile, the brothers were the youngest members of the ranger team, although Bekka, in her early thirties, wasn’t that much older. Gracie’s gaze went from Bekka to Anjie, who was holding her hand and cradling her head, whispering to her. “Goddamn it.”
Bekka and Anjie couldn’t have been more different. Anjie was a native, an experienced hunter, and an old hand at living rough off the land, but Bekka was white, an Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and had worked in a nail salon in Fort St. John, rarely camping for more than a weekend. Maybe it was their shared hatred of the Remnants, or maybe it was because they were the only women on the team, but they had become close. Anjie looked up, cradling Bekka’s head against her chest, anguish in her eyes. “Please, Alex.”
Henry joined them, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips. “What do you want to do, boss?”
Alex yanked the cigarette from the man’s lips, tossed it on the ground, then dragged Henry to the motorcycles. He flicked the switch on the motorcycle, engaging the much louder but more powerful gasoline engine, which rumbled throatily. Gracie engaged his engine as well.
“You three get to the vehicles,” Alex said to Henry and the Sanchez brothers. “Bring them back as fast as you can.”
Henry waited until Royce had climbed back onto his bike then straddled him from behind, grabbing him around the waist.
“What are you going to do?” Dallas asked as Gracie gunned the engine.
“Send Paco a nine-liner.”
As the two motorcycles sped off, maneuvering around the abandoned cars and broken asphalt, Alex pulled the satellite phone from his tactical vest.