The Last Bastion of the Living (The Last Bastion #1)(62)

The gate station came into view nearly an hour later. It felt as if they had been jogging toward it forever. The sun was even lower in the sky now. The whole day was slipping away as they pushed through the Scourge pockets and ran past the ruins of the old settler’s homes and farms.

As they hit an old, cracked road, Omondi burst into a full sprint past the looser packs of Scourge. Maria stuck close to his heels, pumping her arms and racing against the gust of wind hissing through the open gate looming before them.

Beyond the gate were the high summits of the mountains.

It felt as though they were at the edge of the world.

Several crashed tiltrotors lay in wreckage near a turn in the road. The craggy outcropping hadn’t allowed them to get very close to the station. The aircraft and its crew had obviously been overrun by the Scourge and crashed. Another testament to a failed attempt to close the gate. Since the gate failure, so much had gone wrong in the city.

The chain-link fence around the gate station was torn down, the rusted metal twisted into ragged teeth. Omondi leaped over a snarl of fence and pounded up the drive to the concrete and steel facility.

Maria couldn’t take her eyes off the world beyond the gate. She could see an old road, gnarled with weeds, descending downward and out of sight. The mountains beyond the gate were topped in snow and thick clouds. She was mesmerized by the sight of the world beyond the valley. It was like a dream.

“Generator over there,” Omondi called out, motioning.

“Got it!” Holm hoisted the heavy pack on her shoulder and kicked open the chain-link gate into an enclosure tucked into the side of the building.

The mummified remains of the guards who had worked at the gate were scattered across the walkway leading up to the guard station. Only bits of armor and mummified limbs tucked into thick leather gloves and boots remained of the men and women who had witnessed the failure of the gate.

“We’ll need the codes to open the door,” Maria called out to Omondi as he dashed up the stairs to the main entrance. She yanked out her pad to access the information.

“No, we don’t,” he answered in a grim tone.

Maria hesitated in her action. Omondi stood in the gaping doorway of the station. He stared inside with an expression that was difficult to decipher. Maria tucked away her pad as she climbed up the stairs and joined him.

The sunlight illuminated only part of the lobby, but it was evident there had been a battle. Bullet holes festooned the walls. Only armor suits revealed where the guards had fallen. But what Omondi was glowering at was a message left long ago scrawled across the wall in green paint.

“Gaia is free of the human scourge,” Maria read aloud.

“What does it mean?” Cruz asked, joining them. She ran a gloved hand over her short hair, perplexed.

The rest of the squad gathered behind them.

“The Gaia Cult,” Denman said with a sigh.

“What was that?” McKinney’s confusion was matched by a few others.

“In the last days of human world, the Gaia Cult rose up to declare that Mother Earth, Gaia, was purging humanity. They said humans were a virus,” Omondi explained. “They believed that once the last human had died, the Scrags would die, too. And then earth would be saved from us. They even claimed responsibility for the ISPV being released in Paris, London, and Moscow.”

Maria had remembered the Gaia Cult being briefly touched on in world history, but now she knew they would have an even bigger entry. They had compromised the last settlement of the living. Stepping into the lobby, she activated the light on her wristlet and flashed it over the simple rectangular room. The plastic furniture was stained with time and blood.

“Holm, status on that generator,” Omondi said into his wristlet.

The answer was the lights flickering on.

The room was rectangular and bland. The posters on the walls and style of the furniture indicated it had probably been some sort of recreational room for the guards. Omondi crossed the room to another doorway. It was also open. A desk had been wedged into the doorframe to keep it from closing. Sliding over the obstruction, Omondi disappeared into the next room.

Maria followed.

Monitors sprawled across one wall with a work station sprawled under the bank of screens. Sprayed over the monitors and the work station were the words “Gaia has reclaimed the world.” Bodies were caught under the chairs and some of the monitors had bullet holes punched through their dark faces. Now that power had been restored, the flat screens revealed the view from beyond the valley. Cameras began to transmit images from the long road winding up the pass. Even the cameras at the base station at the bottom of the mountain range were operational.

“They would have seen the approach of the Scrag horde that attacked,” Maria remarked.

“Whoever did this,” Omondi pointed at the message, “must have killed the guards.”

“The communication hub was completely destroyed. That’s why there was no warning and the city never could regain remote access,” Denman said, touching the wires spilling out of the destroyed workstation.

“But what brought the Scrags here?” Maria reached out to an operation console and began to quickly search through the recorded files. “This area is very remote.”

Holm climbed over the desk in the doorway and joined them at the workstation. Her face was tense with concentration as she started her diagnostic on the gate.