Extinction Red Line (The Extinction Cycle Book 0) Read online

  More explosions rocked the dirt around him. Mud, water, and vegetation rained down. He ignored the burning sediment that landed on his bare skin and ran faster.

  The other Marines ran too. Some of them dropped as bullets tore into them. He saw a man to his right disappear as a grenade detonated under his feet.

  Brett felt nothing for the man. Nothing fazed him. There was only one thing that mattered…

  Killing.

  Something nicked him as he ran. He looked down, expecting to see a fly on his skin, but instead saw a quarter-sized hole where a bullet had torn into his bicep. A second round pierced his side. The impact slowed him momentarily. The coppery taste of blood filled his mouth. Licking his lips, he continued running.

  He could see the faces of the men trying to kill him as he approached the embankment. They hid under straw hats and helmets, screaming in a language that he did not understand.

  He could smell the sharp scent of gunpowder and the salty sweat on their uniforms.

  When he was ten yards away from the bottom of the hill, he dropped to all fours, gripping his knife between his teeth, and galloped, using his back legs to spring forward. He leaped up in three rapid movements and landed on the chest of one of the Vietnamese soldiers. Pulling his knife from his teeth, he speared the unsuspecting man through the chest, penetrating his heart. The man’s eyes rolled back in his head, and Brett moved on to the next soldier.

  Every thrust sent a thrill through his body. A wide grin spread across his face. He felt insanely powerful.

  Minutes later, the ridgeline was littered with the mangled corpses of the enemy soldiers. A growing river of red seeped down the hill.

  Brett pulled his gaze away to scan his own body. Blood oozed from his wounds, but there was little pain. He ignored the injuries and stepped over one of the bodies.

  The woman’s voice boomed inside his mind. You’re not done!

  Glancing up from a nearby corpse, he saw a slender African American Marine glaring at him with crazed eyes from the bottom of the embankment. The man licked his lips and tossed a knife from his left hand to his right. His green uniform was soaked with blood from a bullet that had clipped his neck. Behind him, Brett could see the field. Pockmarks littered the ground where grenades had exploded. Dozens of bodies lay in the shallow water around the craters.

  Brett looked back and met the man’s dark gaze. Gripping his own knife tightly, he swung the blade toward the skinny Marine. The tip whooshed through the air, but it didn’t deter the man. He dropped to all fours and climbed the hill quickly, his joints clicking with every motion.

  Before Brett could move, the Marine lunged toward him. They collided, tumbling across the bloodstained dirt. The air burst from Brett’s lungs as he finally landed with a thud on the hard earth.

  Brett sucked in a deep breath and then pushed himself to his feet with his knife still in his hand. He caught the other man off guard with an uppercut that lodged the blade inside his skull.

  A strangled sound escaped the Marine’s mouth. He grabbed the knife’s handle as he dropped to his knees. Brett kicked him in the chest and watched with grim fascination as the man hit the dirt on his back and choked on his own blood. He kicked against the ground violently, struggling for several minutes before finally going limp.

  Gasping for air, Brett stumbled away. He dropped to both knees and squinted as a gust of wind swirled dust around him. Stars broke before his eyes. Dizziness set in. He was finally starting to feel the effects of blood loss, but there was still no pain.

  As he looked over the field, a distant memory of a brick house and woman entered his thoughts. He quickly pushed them away. There was only one thing that he wanted now. Only one thing he desired.

  To kill.

  ***

  A bird’s caw startled Brett awake. He peeled a muddy leaf off his face like a scab and glanced up through the canopy of trees at a brilliant moon. The sun had long since gone down, darkness swallowing the jungle.

  Brett pushed himself out of his makeshift bed, flexing his muscles and cracking his neck from side to side.

  It was time to hunt.

  Setting off into the dense vegetation, he used his enhanced vision to search for prey. His eyes roved back and forth, penetrating the darkness. And they continued to improve, giving him borderline night vision.

  A deep growl came from the pit of his stomach. Not the type of pain when you’re hungry, but the type when you’re starving. Odd, he thought, considering he had eaten just a few hours earlier.

  I need more! he thought.

  Brett hadn’t eaten anything substantial for over a day. Mostly just bugs, worms, lizards, and the snake he’d killed with his bare hands.

  He needed something bigger.

  Something human.

  Memories of humans from his recent and distant past surfaced in his mind as he moved through the jungle. Images of his mom, brother, sister, friends, and his ex-girlfriend. Even his dad, who had abandoned him at the age of ten.

  But they all felt disconnected like they didn’t belong to him anymore.

  They came and went like puffs of smoke from a cigarette, vanishing into the night and replaced by a memory so vivid and clear it was like he was there now, back at the forward operating base Condor with the rest of his platoon, preparing to load their choppers for Operation Burn Bright.

  Brett put his filthy hands on his head and bent down behind a tree, closing his eyes as it replayed. In his mind’s eye, he saw Sergeant Fern chewing a wad of tobacco near the tarmac. He spat in the respite of barking at the thirty-plus-man platoon.

  “Today the Marine Corps transcends above what we were put on God’s green Earth for!” Fern shouted. “Today, ladies and gentlemen, you become the most elite warriors ever to set forth on this planet and will do battle under our Lord’s merciful eyes.”

  Fern spat a stream of juice onto the dirt, directing his gaze at a private named McDonald. “Even you, shit-for-brains McD. You might even become a warrior worth a damn.”

  The other men laughed, including Brett, who watched with his arms folded across his chest. He already knew what was coming. They were all about to get the speech about a unique and important opportunity. All of them would get prophylactic injections. All of them would get to go home early. All of them would be better for this. That was what he’d been told. But none of it was true. He wouldn’t learn that, none of them would learn that, until it was far too late. And then the clear memory dissolved into chaos.

  He was back in the jungle, fighting men in uniforms that looked like his, and men wearing rice-farmer hats. A voice commanded him to kill, and kill he did. By the time it was over, he was the last man standing in the gore-filled battlefield, surrounded by a mountain of corpses. He looked down at one of them, a man who looked familiar.

  A man who had been his friend.

  Not only had the true nature of the VX-99 been a lie, its side effects hadn’t ceased after he ran from the blood-soaked hill.

  They had gotten stronger…

  Brett had gotten stronger.

  He snapped out of the memories, his hands outstretched, fingers like claws. A guttural scream erupted from his mouth, scaring off the birds perching in the canopy above. The call of a monkey replied to his scream.

  Brett took off running and jumping over fallen logs. He tore through foliage that stung his skin. His boots slopped through swamps, and branches broke against his muscular body.

  Lancing pain finally stopped him, and he looked down at his bicep in the drip of moonlight. The tattered remains of his camouflage uniform hung off his filthy flesh. A brown scab covered the wound from the battle several days earlier, already healed.

  But how was that possible? Humans weren’t supposed to heal like this. Yet here he was, standing in the Vietnam jungle, looking at a bullet hole almost completely healed.

  It wasn’t just the rapid healing that had changed his body—it was almost like he had become an animal. He was now hearing things that he
had never heard before: the whipping of wings in the air, the crunching of bugs scuttling over the dirt and leaves.

  And he could smell like never before.

  Not just his own sweat, but the scent of animals, birds, and decaying carcasses. His nostrils flared, taking in the fetid jungle air, and led him right toward the intoxicating smell of rot and death. He could almost taste the flesh.

  You must feed.

  The voice in his mind made him flinch, and he crouched down, glaring in all directions. He hadn’t heard her since he woke from his slumber.

  You must eat and regain your strength.

  The female voice growled.

  Brett stopped at the edge of another swamp, the musical sound of insects filling the night. He slowly made his way along the sloped bank, his legs tingling and muscles throbbing.

  Then he saw it.

  A frog the size of an apple.

  Capture and consume, came the raggedy old voice.

  Brett froze and held a breath in his chest. Ever so slowly, he carefully walked through the mud, making sure his boots didn’t slurp. When he was five feet away, he bent down and then leapt. The frog jumped too, but not fast enough. Brett snatched the back leg in his fingers and stuffed the creature in his mouth, biting off the upper half in a sickening crunch.

  He sat in the mud as he enjoyed the treat. For now, the meal satisfied his urge to kill and consume flesh.

  But he knew the hunger would return.

  Every day that passed, he lost more and more of himself to the violent urges in his mind. He wasn’t even sure how much time had passed since he was dropped off in the jungle, but he knew he was losing snippets of his past life. Eventually it would be gone. He would forget everything that made him who he’d been before the VX-99 had forged a new creature.

  The moon climbed higher into the sky, and Brett continued deeper into the jungle. He hunted until the predawn glow brightened the trees, and the nocturnal creatures returned to their lairs.

  But Brett wasn’t done hunting. His stomach wasn’t full, and the voice urged him onward. He sniffed the air, picking up on something…different.

  Smoke.

  He sniffed the air again, identifying another scent. His eyes widened and his stomach growled at the new odor. It was sickeningly tempting and was all he needed to take off running at a sprint, ducking under branches, navigating a floor of tangled roots, and jumping over puddles of standing water.

  Lieutenant Brett ran until he saw the source of the smoke—a village in a clearing beyond the dense canopy. Using trees for cover, he kept to the shadows that clung to the edges of the dim early morning light. People were talking quietly so as not to disturb those still sleeping. Several groups headed out to feed the livestock and work the land.

  He jumped onto the base of a tree and climbed the branches to the top, looking out over the village. Several men holding weapons patrolled the outskirts, and more stalked the muddy roads carving up the camp.

  At the far end, a group of shacks with barred windows caught his attention. Inside, half-naked men sat in the dirt, bone thin and bearded. A guard tossed a bucket of slop through the bars, covering one of the men in brown sludge.

  Laughter followed.

  And so did the voice in his mind.

  Her words sparked a jolt of adrenaline through his warm veins.

  Kill them. Kill them all.

  Brett climbed back down to the dirt, where he rubbed mud over his exposed flesh for camouflage. Then he set off for the village, heading for a pen of livestock. Farmers stood around the outside, tossing in food. They were older, wrinkled, and hunched. They wore the difficulties of their lives in their shoulders and in the creases that marked their faces.

  He already knew the older people didn’t taste as good, but he didn’t come here to kill them. He came here for the cleaver jammed in a log of wood. Carmine stains covered the blade from chickens that had lost their heads here.

  Hatchet in hand, Brett moved around the farms and into the heart of the village. A guard wearing black fatigues and a tan rice-farmer hat stood with his back to Brett, holding an AK-47.

  Rip his throat out, the female voice barked. Take his eyes!

  Brett hugged the shadows, most of the villagers still sleeping in the shacks and huts. The soldier turned right when Brett got within striking distance. He planted the cleaver in his skull, the crunch echoing. The man dropped to his knees, and Brett yanked it out.

  Take your trophy, the voice said.

  Using the sharp blade, Brett hacked off the man’s right ear and then tucked it in his vest pocket. The body slumped to the ground as he took off. For the next fifteen minutes he killed his way through the village, taking down five soldiers and two villagers that had spotted him murdering. He slit their throats, hacked off their limbs, and took more trophies.

  By the time the sun shone over the village, a dozen people were dead, and he had two fresh limbs in a bag over his muscular back.

  It was then an alarm finally sounded.

  Voices called out in all directions. No more laughter, only frightened and panicked voices that brought him a grim sense of joy.

  Brett had made his way to the far edge of the village, where the half-naked men were being kept in barred-up huts. He crawled in the mud toward the prison, wiggling across the dirt like a worm. A voice sounded as he approached and this wasn’t the one in his mind.

  “Someone has come to rescue us.”

  “Where?” came another voice. “I don’t see anyone.”

  To Brett’s ears the words meant nothing, but he still turned to look at the group of four men who had made their way to the bars, clutching them with blistered fingers and peering down. One of them spotted him.

  “Hey…hey, you,” he said.

  “He’s an American…” another guy said, pointing.

  Their bearded, gaunt faces all looked down at him, blue and brown eyes pleading. Ribs showed under filthy tattered clothes, and yellow bandages covered infected wounds.

  He followed the man’s finger to his shoulder and the red, white and blue flag sewn onto the camo. A brief moment of pride flashed over him, but it passed just as suddenly as it emerged. The symbol meant something to these men, and perhaps it had once meant something to him, but Brett was no longer the man he was days earlier.

  He had changed.

  Transcended into something even more powerful than he ever thought possible.

  More voices yelled across the village, and a gunshot sounded.

  Brett crawled away from the hut, deciding these men would not be good killing, too easy. And they probably wouldn’t taste all that good either.

  “Don’t leave us!” one of them shouted. It was a cry for help. It was a call for sympathy. A cry for humanity. But to Lieutenant Trevor Brett, the pleas meant nothing. He was no longer a Marine—he was a beast.

  On all fours, Brett scampered away like the animal he had transformed into. When he got far enough away, he stood to run with the bag of limbs slapping his shoulder and a breast pocket full of ears and noses. They would make good trophies for his necklace.

  — 1 —

  London, England

  April 17, 1980

  Jimmy Linh read the words again. They resonated.

  Ma Trang. White Ghost.

  He leaned back in his seat, dropped the newsprint, and bobbed the Earl Grey tea bag up and down in the steaming cup near the edge of the table. White Ghost.

  He was at his regular breakfast spot in Lewisham, a borough in southeastern London, and had a few minutes to spare before he’d need to catch the tube to work. He picked up the cup and blew across the steeping tea, preferring the English Earl Grey over the traditional Vietnamese trà mạn tea with hints of jasmine or lotus. He looked again at the Vietnamese community paper he read to keep his native language fresh in his head. The headline was the grabber. He wondered if he was translating it correctly.

  White Ghost Kills Again, Terrorizes Villages along Da River

  Li
nh read the short article for the fourth time, lingering on the details about a half-human beast that ate its victims alive. For nearly a decade, the Ma Trang, as villagers called it, would appear from nowhere. It had unearthly speed and large claws it used to attack its victims. It always left behind the remains and disappeared into the jungle.

  Some even claimed it was the ghost of an American Marine killed by the Vietcong. Ma Trang was exacting its revenge, they said.

  Linh checked his watch and cursed, drawing the offended glare of an older, proper woman at the table adjacent to his. He took his first and last sip of tea and winced when it burned the tip of his tongue. He puckered his lips and pushed himself from the table, tucked the paper under his arm, and grabbed his brown leather satchel from the floor to head for the Lewisham station.

  He rushed through the morning crowds, plucking and weaving his way amongst the other commuters to find his seat on the train bound for London’s central station. It was a forty-five-minute ride and he’d need every second of it to perfect his pitch.

  Linh found an empty spot at a window near the front of a car, thanked Buddha for his good fortune, and plopped into the seat. He put his satchel at his feet, opened it, and drew out a reporter’s notebook and a pen.

  He placed the notebook on one leg, the newspaper on the other, and held the pen between his teeth as he thought about the best way to convince his boss that Ma Trang was a story he had to tell.

  Linh was a cub reporter for the London Morning Reflector, a widely read daily newspaper known as much for its flash as its substance. Linh was cutting his teeth and needed a good pitch, not only to impress his editor, but to ease the pressure from his parents.

  They believed him too smart to waste his life as a reporter, as the teller of other people living their lives. Linh had resisted their pull to the family business so far, but if he didn’t do something big and soon, he knew he’d be forced into servitude.

  The train eased from the station with a whine and sudden jerk before reaching its rhythm on the tracks. Linh was so deep in thought, he didn’t notice they’d left Lewisham or that a young woman in a brown trench coat was trying to get his attention.