Orion Colony Complete Series Boxed Set J.N. Chaney (books for new readers .txt) 📖

Tong had the satellite set to give us a wide aerial view of the landscape around us. True to his word not to get taken by surprise again, he had the view set out to ten miles in every direction. Tiny dots began to form like some kind of disease on the screen.

The canyon we were in served as the center of the map in a long narrow line. On either side of the canyon, just emerging from the sides of the map, these tiny figures moved at tremendous speed.

“Stacy, Dean, are you seeing this?” Tong asked through our earpieces. “Legion’s running at us. They still have a way to go on foot, but they’ll reach either side of the canyon in an hour, maybe longer.”

“I see it,” Stacy said out loud.

“You see the glory of the power I bring,” Legion said. “There is no hope. The body I possess now, this Captain Ezra Harold, knows a fitting line for what is about to happen. ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here,’ I think is appropriate.”

“We’re done here,” Stacy said, looking over to me with despair evident in her expression. “All this ever was, was a stall for time.”

I took a step forward, removing my helmet so I could look Legion in his dark, feral eyes.

“I’m going to be the one to kill you,” I told him. For as much as he was trying to get into our heads, it was my turn to do the same to him. It was a tactic I’d used in the gladiator circuit. “I’m going to watch you burn.”

Just like that, Legion’s smile vanished. His dark eyes began to ooze with ebony liquid like dark tears. He snarled at me, and spittle flew from his lips.

“Why wait?” he asked with a sneer.

“Dean,” Stacy said to me. She reached out and put a hand on my shoulder—whether to stop me or support, I wasn’t sure.

“Because we know now that we can kill you and free our people from your hold,” I told him. “I’m not going to kill you because that would be killing Ezra Harold.” That realization made me think of the many that we had killed in self-preservation, and I found myself becoming even angrier at this virus, a blight on the planet that needed to be eradicated, the sooner the better.

“We need to go,” Stacy said as she removed her hand from my shoulder. “This is what he wants. He wants to stall us for as long as he can to surround us.”

I walked backward slowly and purposefully, never taking my eyes from Legion.

“I’m going to take everything you care about, everything you love, Dean Slade,” Legion yelled after me. “Your dog, your friends, Stacy.”

I turned and jogged back to the predators with Stacy. Legion’s threats were white noise to me at this point. I knew he was only trying to evoke an emotional reaction from me now and I refused to give him what he wanted.

“So that went well,” John said as Stacy and I got back into our respective predators. “Want me to run him over?”

“It’s still the captain somewhere in there,” Lou reminded John. “If we can kill Legion, we can save him. We can save all of them.”

“They’re gaining on us from the sides of the canyon,” Tong said, looking at his data pad. “If we drive hard, we might be able to make it out of here before they reach the edges, but it’s going to be close. We need to be faster and go now!”

“Let’s go,” Stacy said. “Dean, you take the lead. Drive like hell.”

“On it,” I said, jumping into the predator. The engine was still running. I stomped on the gas and we took off like a shot. John did the same, peeling out and kicking up clouds of dust.

Legion moved to the side, waving goodbye. Usually when someone waved, a friendly smile accompanied the action. This time around, he stared at us with those bleeding black eyes and an evil smile.

I moved my eyes away from the psychopathic virus and studied the road ahead. The canyon didn’t wind very much, but in the darkness it took my full concentration to not only drive fast, but avoid the many rocks and boulders in our path. If I ran over one, it could mean huge damage to the predator, and that wasn’t something we could afford right now.

Sulk said something out loud that Tong translated a moment later.

“He says if we make it through the canyon, his people have an underground installation less than an hour away. We can head there.” Tong paused, exchanging words with Sulk once more. “Last time he was there, Legion had not laid siege to it, but he can’t be sure this time around.”

“We’ll find a way through, even if Legion is trying to block our entry point,” Lou said over the comms. “We haven’t come this far not to make it.”

For the next hour, I drove as quickly as I could without sacrificing our safety. If I missed a boulder or other large obstruction, we were done. Lucky for me, the headlights on the predator cut through the darkness and spread out as if it were bright as day, as long as the field of vision was right in front of the predator.

John kept the other vehicle a safe distance behind me as we continued. No tailgating on this trail. If I had to stop suddenly and he plowed into me, we could potentially be stranded with no working vehicle. Whenever I could, I took a quick look at the satellite feed in the lower right-hand corner of my HUD.

The tiny dots symbolizing infected were growing, like two waves headed toward one another that were about to crash on the canyon between them. Even more concerning, there was no end to the canyon in sight. The infected managed to somehow span the entire area as they