Something hard digging into the small of Drew's back forced him to sit up. He glanced down the freeway; to his left were several motionless cars, but no signs of life. To his right was the emergency turn around and more abandoned vehicles. Only a few people had been on the road so late at night, and it looked like most of the cars had pulled over when their lights and power steering died.
He began walking towards the turnaround, looking in the cars he passed on his way. There wasn't any broken glass or other signs you would typically assign to an accident; they simply looked like parked cars.
"Where did everyone go?" he asked himself. There weren't any bodies. Thinking back, he realized that the only sign of a human's death he had come across was the blood-streaked hallway and severed hand near the spider queen. He looked at the base and frowned. Bolling was a bigger base--they had people living on it. Where would everyone have gone?
Crossing over the freeway and frontage road, he looked dubiously at the woods running alongside the road. It looked impenetrable with thick foliage and smaller trees that were about 15 feet tall while being wide enough that he couldn't see the far side. He headed south along the road, something about the liminal space being empty felt surreal to him, like reality had been warped in an inexplicable way.
Twice he stopped, having heard some large animal moving in the small green space next to him, but he couldn't identify its source with either mana sight or his regular vision. He quickened his pace as the feeling of being watched unnerved him.
It didn't exactly surprise him when the black squirrel jumped down onto the road, but he wasn't happy about it. Another one followed the first, and he turned to glance behind him and saw that one had blocked his retreat as well. Originally a gift from Canada to America in the early 1900s, the caretaker of the national zoo immediately released the animals into a park and they had spread throughout the DC metro area over the next hundred years. These squirrels were obviously mana twisted: they were about three feet long from nose to the base of their tail, which then doubled that length. They were also far more aggressive than they should be, and their auras were a faint mixture of green and red.
Drew shook his head. It wasn't the time to think about history lessons when he was likely about to be attacked by squirrels. The two in front of him were spread out enough that a fireball wasn't going to hit them both, and he really didn't like not being able to see all three at the same time. He glanced behind himself again and cast an acid dart at the one there, trying to force it to advance. He didn't count on how fast they would be as it nimbly dodged out of the way of the projectile while chittering angrily at him.
He had never not hit his target with that spell before. This was bad.
The two squirrels that had been south of him had begun rushing forward when he turned his attention to the one behind him. Great, pack tactics. Drew didn't have time to curse out loud, but he pointed a finger at the two squirrels and began running towards them.
Mana may have twisted them to make them more aggressive, but it hadn't been long enough that the natural prey animal instincts didn't take over for a moment. They both diverted away from Drew, who charged past them and then fired a cone of frost blindly behind him.
The angry squawk he heard told Drew that he had made at least some contact. He blink stepped the full fifty feet the spell allowed down the pavement and then pivoted, launching a fireball at his afterimage. The fireball exploded near the first one right as it jumped to attack the image. He detonated the fireball with the squirrel within its blast radius, singing its black fur. The blast caused the already airborne beast to change direction abruptly, impacting the tree line with a crunch. The other two were unaffected by the blast but seemed confused by his disappearance.
He took the time to begin casting storm, assuming they would see him and attack sooner rather than later. He was correct; two seconds of disorientation was all the time he was given. With three seconds left on the cast, he wasn't sure if it would be enough time. He aborted the cast a second later to launch a cone of frostfire with one hand and a frostfire ball with the other. They were too close to dodge and they took both spells full on. One of the squirrels' face was cut into shreds by the ice shards while the other rocked back on a leg that had frozen to the ground, bending in an unnatural way.
He launched a spark at the one squirrel that still had a face and then backed up, not sure if any of them were still alive enough to pose a threat.
Something hard impacted into blade barrier behind him and he turned around to find a fourth squirrel. It tried to bite his leg again before he could respond. He kicked as hard as he could, none of his close-range attacks off cooldown yet. His hand searched for the dagger he had picked up from the first orc attack as he jumped onto the last squirrel, trusting in mana guard to keep him alive while he stabbed it into the thing's flesh.
The squirrel was a lot harder to keep a hold of than he had anticipated. Wriggling around, he could see flashes of yellow light where its claws raked against his mana guard. He pulled the dagger out and then tried to stab its chest, but it rolled, and the blade glanced off a rib, doing only minor damage.
Slamming his body weight into the thing to keep it from wriggling, he stabbed again, and this time the blade pierced it between the ribs. The creature let out a wild scream and then bucked, throwing Drew off. It tried to move away from the human, but the blade hindered its movement to a crawl. Drew cast another bolt of electricity, and then followed it up with an acid dart to its head. It twitched a few times and then collapsed, still.
Drew heaved himself up, looking around for any other threats in the area, but found himself alone again. With a sigh of relief, he went to stand up, only to realize that somewhere in the fight the squirrel had scored a five inch long, relatively shallow gash down his calf.
"Fuck," he cursed, sitting back down. He pulled the backpack around in front of him, grabbing a bottle of water. He drank a gulp or two and then poured the rest of it on the wound, wincing as the liquid encountered his torn flesh. He then ripped off portions of the spare shirt he had packed and used it as a bandage before casting refresh on himself.
Standing up again, he gingerly put weight on the leg to test it. "Well, that's fucking amazing." It could support his weight, but he wouldn't be fast. He was about halfway to the commissary but heading into unknown territory when he could no longer effectively run. This was a bad idea. However, if they didn't get help for Sarah soon, she might never wake up. He looked at the squirrel corpses around him, their auras having already faded to leave them colorless, and weighed his options. Then he slung the backpack over his shoulders again and began limping south, towards Bolling.
The slow walk down the frontage road was otherwise uneventful, for which Drew was grateful, as his leg was beginning to ache more and more. About a mile down the road, the tree line ended and there was a slight bank down to an eight-foot-tall wall. Standing next to the wall and staring up, he considered his options. If his leg wasn't injured, he could probably jump up and climb over the wall.
Casting gravitas, it took almost five seconds to float up to the top of the wall and another ten to make his way down the other side, landing with a grunt when his bad leg took the weight.
Crossing the wall, he'd landed on a field surrounding a parking lot. Directly ahead of him was the Defense Intelligence Agency or DIA building. He had attended a few trainings there, and if he recalled correctly, it was the tallest building on the base. That probably made it the safest place for him to go. If he gravitated to the top of it, he could get a good view of the base and hopefully avoid any more mana twisted predators like those gods damned squirrels.
"Stupid fourth squirrel," he muttered to himself. As he crossed the parking lot, he considered the building in front of him. The near portion was only two to three stories tall, rather low compared to the eight-story portion of the building he was headed for. If he took his time, he could blink step up the building easily and then make his way across the roof to the taller sections.
Between them were a few guard posts and parking lots. The DIA complex's parking garage was due west, but like everywhere he had seen, it was mostly empty. The overnight guys must have parked somewhere else.
He stopped at the vehicle checkpoint where there were no guards. And again, no sign of blood. What had happened to everyone? He was in the middle of one of the most important buildings in DC. Thousands of the movers and shakers in the nation's capital passed through this building daily. Yet there were no guards, no signs of life. Would they have evacuated already? How long had it been?
His mind turned over the possibilities as he made his slow way through the abandoned fortifications. He failed the timing on his second blink step, landing with his weight at the wrong point and tripping, falling over the guardrail and getting small rocks embedded in his hands when he stuck them out to break his fall.
"Fuckity fuck," he cursed as he sat up and began digging rocks out of his hands. Several of them were deep enough that he had to pull out his pocket knife and cut them out. He then pulled out another bottle of water. He only had a few more bottles, he realized with a frown, but he suppressed his groans and washed out the dirt and grime, then wrapped his hands with what was left of the shirt he had used to bandage his leg.
That's when he heard the noise.
It was a dull thudding, like a drum. He frowned. It seemed to be coming from the other side of the building, and he quickly advanced the last couple hundred feet and cast gravitas on himself again, floating up the side of the building. He shot past the top and then reduced his gravity until he was floating free in the air. Casting blink step, he landed on the roof, not wanting to worry about controlling the landing properly with gravitas.
He could hear the throbbing better now; it was coming from the open area on the south side of the DIA building. When he finally reached the corner, he caught sight of his first human life since Katie.
The public entrance of the DIA building was adjacent to several parking lots and a couple baseball fields off to the west, as well as a well-maintained soccer field to the south. Moving around on the soccer field about half a mile away were a few dozen humans. They appeared to be dragging other humans to a large stack of wood they had built up in the center of the field.
The source of the throbbing sound was indeed a set of drums. Three figures were seated and beating on a single drum that must have been at least a meter in diameter, although it was hard to tell at this distance and it might have been much bigger.
He watched entranced as they dragged half a dozen people (Or were they bodies? They weren't moving.) over to the pile of wood, carefully placing them on top of it. Once all they had all been placed on the wood, the figures all stood in a circle around it, except for one who stood closer and began gesturing with his hands. He could hear words being shouted, but it was difficult to make them out over the wind and the drums.
The one in the center then pointed at the woodpile and a crack of lightning descended from the sky, catching the wood on fire with a thunderous boom. That's when he heard the screams. The people in the fire were crying out in pain and fear. They were still alive.
Drew slumped back down onto the roof, his face turning white as he realized that he had just witnessed people being sacrificed.