Old Enemy (The Survivors Book Six) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright ©

  Books By Nathan Hystad

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE

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  Red Creek by Nathan Hystad

  BY

  NATHAN HYSTAD

  Copyright © 2018 Nathan Hystad

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover art: Tom Edwards Design

  Edited by: Scarlett R Algee

  Proofed and Formatted by: BZ Hercules

  Books By Nathan Hystad

  The Survivors Series

  The Event

  New Threat

  New World

  The Ancients

  The Theos

  Old Enemy

  Red Creek

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  ONE

  Rain pelted down to the streets, and as we watched through the window, the roadways grew deep puddles. We were perched on the second floor of a squat building, overtop of a mechanic shop, and we were all growing tired of the endless downpour.

  “Is it ever going to stop?” Mary asked. We’d made bunks of the offices, each personalized with things we’d found around the city. We were now sitting in what we called our living space, where floor-to-ceiling windows allowed us to see outside even when conditions weren’t ideal.

  “I don’t think so,” Slate offered. “For a world with a lava ocean, where does the precipitation even come from?”

  Suma was perched on a chair, and she wiggled her short legs back and forth, her feet not quite able to touch the ground. “There has to be a large source of water other than the small sources we’ve found out there.” She said the words in a mixture of English and Shimmali. Our translators were turned off, but we’d spent the last three months trying to learn each other’s languages, since we didn’t have much else to do.

  “Should we try to find it?” I asked. “We haven’t been able to get a vessel to function. Maybe we should just leave the city.”

  Mary was beside me on the couch. Some things were universal no matter what race we came across. She leaned back, sighed, and rubbed her ever-expanding belly. “Is it a good time to go exploring? I think we need to hunker down, hope the rain stops, and keep working on the ships.”

  “I agree,” Slate said. “There’s still a lot of the city we haven’t explored. Who knows what we’ll find?”

  “Hopefully an engine with a technology familiar to me. Whoever these people were, they did things their own way.” Suma slipped off her chair and went to the window to stare at the ceaseless rain.

  We knew enough about the race that had abandoned their world, but we didn’t know where they’d run to. After spending three months here, I was beginning to understand why they left. When it wasn’t gusting wind or firing electrical storms at the city, it was raining for weeks at a time.

  I set a hand on Mary’s leg and gave it a light squeeze. “You’re right. We’ll keep working on the ships. How are you feeling?” I asked her quietly, not wanting to mention the bags that had begun to grow under her eyes. I knew she hadn’t been sleeping well, and often woke to her screaming out in her sleep. She wouldn’t admit it, but I thought she was having nightmares fueled by her time under the Iskios’ control.

  “I’m fine. As worried as I am about the baby, I want her to come out already.” Mary closed her eyes, and no one spoke for a few minutes. The sound of the rain hitting the glass was the only noise in the room.

  Slate stood, rushing to the window. “What was that?”

  Mary’s eyes darted open, and I got up to stand beside my large friend. “What did you see?” I asked.

  He pointed to the east. “I saw something flash over there.”

  “More lightning, probably,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No. This was different.”

  We watched for a few moments, and I saw it too this time. “There!” I called, pointing a little more south. It was a circle of light, the kind made from a ship’s searchlight. “Someone’s here.”

  Suma finished the thought. “And they’re looking for us.”

  Mary was beside me, her eyes wide. “Maybe it’s our people,” she said hopefully.

  “Maybe not. We can’t take the chance right now.” Slate gripped a pulse rifle in his hand. I had no idea where it had been stashed, but it had to be somewhere close. I was glad someone was always ready and alert. I’d grown a little complacent in my time on this planet.

  Part of me had actually enjoyed being stranded, because I was with Mary, and Slate and Suma were some of the best company I could have asked for. We were living like Robinson Crusoe on an alien world, with no one to bother us. Nobody to save from extinction, no threats to our lives other than dealing with our own basic day-to-day survival. Food. Shelter. Water. The lights we saw were a compromise to that new life, one way or another. If it was our people, I was glad to go home to New Spero, but I knew my life would never again be like the last three months.

  “We have to get a closer look,” I said. “Suma, is there any way they can detect us?”

  Suma looked thoughtful, concern etched over her forehead, and her snout twitched as she considered my question. “I don’t think so. If they have technology similar to that on Shimmal and New Spero, then they can’t pick up the small frequencies we may be emitting with, say, our pulse rifles or comm devices.”

  “Suma, can you stay here with Mary? Slate and I will run point on this.” I started toward the door, where I could get my EVA on. It would keep me warm and dry in the downpour.

  Mary got up and advanced toward me. “Where do you think you’re going?” I asked her.

  “With you. I don’t want to sit around helplessly.” Mary started to put her jumpsuit on and nearly screamed when it didn’t zip up over her baby bump.

  I touched her hand, and she pulled it back. “I’ve done nothing but wait around for three months now, and I’m getting tired of it,” she said. “I know you’re having fun here on desolate-city-world, but I’m about to have a baby, and I want to go home. If this is our people coming to get us, I want to be there.”

  “Mary, I’m all for that, but they could be hostile,” Slate said, stepping into a fight he wasn’t invited to. I was still glad he did.

  Mary looked from Slate to me and sighed, stepping out of the undersized jumpsuit. “Fine. Be careful, okay?”
<
br />   “We will.” I grabbed my earpiece and passed Mary hers. “This way, it’s like you’re with me.”

  In the last few months, Mary and I had remained close. At first I hadn’t let her out of my sight, worried she’d disappear again. I wouldn’t let that happen. Eventually, I started to try to give her space, and now it was her turn to make sure we didn’t get too far apart.

  Mary accepted the earpiece and placed it in, giving me a half-hearted smile as she did so.

  “Suma, can you still see them searching out there?” Slate asked, clasping his EVA helmet on. The air was breathable here, but we always used oxygen when performing laborious tasks.

  Suma stared out the window across the room and pointed to the east. “It looks like they’re doing a short pattern. Down a few blocks, then over one and down again. They don’t want to miss an inch.”

  I nodded, scratching at my unruly beard before clasping my own helmet on. Slate passed me a pulse rifle, and I clipped it to my back. “We’re just going to survey the situation, report back, and analyze.” I looked to Mary, who seemed concerned, her hand resting on her belly.

  “Come on, boss. Let’s go.”

  A few minutes later, we were down the stairs and onto the street. Cold rain barraged us and everything in its path as we jogged along the buildings on the side of the street.

  “Let’s head east, but past the line they’re following. That way, we can see them from a block away before they have a chance of spotting us,” I said, hoping my logic was sound. We turned north and ran two blocks, before heading east once again. This part of the city was full of shorter buildings, the odd high-rise scattered among them. Over here, the tall ones were residences. I’d spent countless days searching through the ancient civilization’s homes, trying to get a sense of who they were and what they’d fled.

  The videos we’d found suggested it was the never-ending storms and the lava that had caused them to run from the world we now knew to be named Sterona, but after being here all this time ourselves, we found they likely could have stayed. Unless there was something we were missing.

  It was still daytime, but the dense black cloud cover made it darker than normal. Lightning flashed, and thunder followed behind as we kept moving down the vacant streets.

  “Up there.” Slate pointed a few city blocks over, where a bright search light shone down while an alien lander roamed the skies above the buildings.

  “Do you recognize it?” I asked, trying to recall if I’d ever seen one like it. I used the zoom on my visor, and a green grid appeared as I followed the lander. I tapped my arm console and snapped a few images of it. It was boxy and larger than I’d originally thought. Our landers were small transport vessels, but this looked like it could house two dozen people.

  “A dropship?” Slate asked, mirroring my own thoughts. “It could be full of some race’s military. We don’t have the ammunition to take on an invasion, boss.”

  “You’re right. Let’s stick around and see if we can learn anything else.” I leaned back, covered by a derelict restaurant’s awning. Maybe they’d just leave if they didn’t find anything. Or maybe it was our friends, borrowing a ship. There was no way to be sure, and I didn’t want to make a gamble that could cost us our lives. With a baby on the way, I couldn’t make those kinds of rash decisions anymore.

  We stood there, rain pelting down to the street before us for at least an hour, watching the dropship wind its way over the city on a systematic path, almost as if a computer program was controlling it.

  “Slate, have you noticed that the ship’s on a pattern?” I asked, feeling like I was onto something.

  “Yes, it is. I haven’t seen any variance in it. There’s no one at the manual controls on this ship,” he answered, confirming my suspicion. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  “How so?”

  “It could be a program. Hell, it could be Dubs flying a borrowed ship,” Slate said, referencing W, the robot we’d found on Larsk Two.

  “I wish we knew. It’s time to leave this world and get Mary back home, where there are doctors – and our homes.” Suddenly, I was homesick. I’d been playing at surviving this world for three months, but it finally hit me. Home. Without the portal working, it seemed so far away.

  “Me too.” Slate looked to the sky. He was fiercely missing the new woman in his life, Denise.

  “Let’s head back. We have enough images. We can see what Suma and Mary think.” It was nice to have a team around me to help make decisions.

  We went back the way we’d come, the dropship now past the dwelling where we were holed up. As we made our way inside, water dripped off our suits, and we took them off downstairs in the garage, hanging them up to dry. Slate grabbed his pulse rifle, found mine leaning on the wall, and passed it to me.

  “We can’t be too careful,” he said, and I took it, feeling the metal handle dig into my palm.

  As much as I wanted to be done with guns, portals and spaceships, I knew I wasn’t. I never would be. We moved upstairs, and I told myself to lift one foot at a time. One foot at a time.

  TWO

  “I’ve never seen anything like that, but it’s not in my tablet database,” Suma said, scrolling through the images on her handheld device. Her English was nearly perfect, and I was amazed that our vocal cords could even remotely duplicate one another’s speech. Our Shimmali sounded like a herd of cats attacking a bird sanctuary, but she picked up most of it.

  “How about the shape? Can you reference that? With the size?” Mary asked, and Suma’s snout straightened as she tried that.

  “Nothing exactly the same, but it does look like there’s something similar from a faraway system. We only had the drawings, though, so I could be wrong.” Suma showed us some line art, and it was similar in style.

  “Where’s it from?” I asked, feeling like we were about to learn if they were friends or foes.

  “It’s blocked!” she exclaimed. “How’s that possible? I’ve never seen it before. The text says ‘encrypted’.”

  “That doesn’t bode well for us. Okay, what do we do?” Mary asked.

  I shifted in my seat, grabbing a cup of water and drinking it in one big gulp. “We have a couple of choices. Stay put, don’t show ourselves, and wait here until someone we know shows up.”

  “Which might be never,” Mary chimed in.

  “Correct. Or we flag them down and hope they aren’t here to kill us,” I finished.

  Mary leaned as far forward as she could and rested her face on her palms. She was clearly upset, and my arm curled around her, bringing her to rest her head on my shoulder. I kissed the top of her head and whispered to her, “We’ll get home.”

  “When? When can I get home?” She shouted the question.

  Slate stood, a grim look on his face. “I’ll flag them down. Suma, we have the flares we found last month, right?”

  “Yes, but…” Suma started to say.

  Slate cut her off. “I’ll go to the other side of the city, fire off some flares, and get their attention. If they’re hostile, then you three will still be safe. If it’s Magnus or Leslie, or anyone else we know, we’ll come for you.”

  I wanted to laugh at him, but I could tell he was absolutely serious. “Slate, you can’t do that.”

  He shrugged. “I’m tired of being here too, boss. For the first time in my life, I feel like I have a home. Someone to get back to.”

  “Then getting yourself killed isn’t the answer,” Mary said. “We wait it out and see what happens. If it is Leslie or Magnus and Natalia, they won’t leave without finding out evidence of us.”

  She was right. “We wait and watch,” I said.

  Slate sat back down, and nodded. “What I wouldn’t give for a hamburger right now,” he said, grabbing a piece of fruit and biting into it.

  “And a beer,” I added. We were all feeling the effects of the local-vegetation diet. Other than the fruit we’d first found, we’d managed some sort of bean and a variet
y of nuts, giving us a slightly more balanced diet. My own pants were always trying to fall to the ground. It was a good thing we mainly wore the jumpsuits.

  We sat into the night, talking about home for the first time in months. Not only mentioning it like it was a destination, but discussing all the things we couldn’t wait to get back to. The conversation led back to Earth and the things we missed from there too. For Slate, it was action movies. Mary missed going to her hometown’s fall carnival when she was a kid, and I missed so many things that I couldn’t keep track.

  Suma watched silently, laughing and smiling as we reminisced.

  By the time we couldn’t see the ship’s lights in the distance out the far window, we decided to get some sleep. Tomorrow would be another day. Tomorrow might determine our futures.

  ____________

  Dim light shone through the window of our room, and I rolled onto my back, covering my eyes with my arm. Mary made a noise beside me, and I draped myself over her, feeling the warmth radiate off her body in waves.

  “Morning,” she said sleepily.

  “Morning.” I sat up in bed, swinging my feet to the ground. “I’m going to check on Slate.”

  “Okay. I’ll be out soon,” Mary said.

  I hopped into my jumpsuit and plodded out into the shared common space. I’d had nightmares that Slate had left us to expose himself to the ship hovering over our city. I was grateful to see the big man still with us.

  “Slate. How was your watch?” I asked him. Suma had taken first watch, I took the second, and Slate rounded us out with the last.

  “Uneventful.” He was still staring out the window, and I could tell something was weighing on him.

  “You almost did it, didn’t you?” I asked, not having to say what it was.

  He nodded. “But you were right. I have someone to get back to now. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it.”

  “Did you ever think how your dying would affect us, Slate?” I asked him, and he finally turned to me.