He had assumed the kid was afraid of being tortured, of being killed in some gruesome way. He had assumed Tucker had merely preferred to set the terms of his own death rather than waiting for the men who were hunting him to come along and do things their way.
But now he wondered.
If Tucker had known about this army—this gang—and about what they were capable of, perhaps he would have gone to any lengths to avoid being drafted into it. Maybe he knew they were coming for him, not to kill him, but to take him into custody. To make him one of them.
Maybe he also thought his life wasn’t worth saving if it meant turning himself over to their service.
Slow down, Adam told himself firmly. You don’t know any of this. It’s all pure speculation, and you might be overreacting. But he thought it was true. It had the feel of truth to it, even though he couldn’t know for sure.
A blond, brown-eyed man came over. He looked like he belonged on a surfboard, right down to the scruffy hair. Adam guessed this army wasn’t too picky about its members’ appearance.
“Hey,” the man said. “You two are the newcomers, right?”
Adam hesitated, then nodded. “That’s right.”
“I’m Clay,” the man said. “I’m here to show you to your transport. It’s time to head back to base.”
Adam didn’t want to go with Clay. He certainly didn’t want to go back to a base of operations, where these soldiers might well be uniting with not only the force he’d seen at the Ocean View, but more like them. But there was no point in attempting an escape right now, surrounded by soldiers. If we want to get out of here, he realized, it’s going to have to be a whole operation. For now, we’re stuck.
He got to his feet. Beside him, Ella did the same. He reached over and gave her hand a squeeze, hoping it conveyed everything he was thinking. Nothing’s changed. It’s still you and me against the world.
Clay led them out of the mess tent and toward a long row of jet-black military vehicles. These were being loaded up with supplies. Duffel bags. Weapons. Crates that almost certainly contained food.
They have so much.
“Don’t get suckered in,” Artem’s voice rang in Adam’s head. “Keep your guard up.”
Adam steeled himself and boarded one of the Humvees, hoping he would be a match for whatever came next.
TO BE CONTINUED
KEEP READING FOR A SNEAK PREVIEW OF ESCAPE THE DARK BOOK 4: CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE
Caught in the Crossfire
Chapter 1
July 20, 2026
Adam Parkhead was jolted awake, suddenly and violently, by the Humvee in which he was being transported coming to an abrupt stop. Beside him, his traveling companion, Ella Martin, jerked her hands up into a defensive position, as if to ward off an attacker, and he knew that she’d had the same experience he had just had. She had been asleep, and the vehicle’s sudden stop had jerked her awake.
It was hard for Adam to believe he had fallen asleep at all, circumstances being what they were. He was surrounded by members of a military organization he didn’t understand, an organization that had summarily loaded him into this vehicle and taken to the highway. He didn’t know who these people were, and he certainly had no reason to trust them. And they were all armed.
Adam remembered only too clearly his last encounter with a gun. He and Ella had been searching for food and shelter and had encountered a survivalist whose sanity had clearly been on its last legs. The man had become violent, and Adam had been forced to shoot him in self-defense…
But they’d only had small handguns in that altercation. That was very different from being surrounded by military-grade weapons, as he was now.
None of the soldiers seemed to have moved since the last time he had looked at them. Did that mean he hadn’t been asleep for very long? Or had he been out for hours, and they were just capable of sitting still like this because they were soldiers?
It occurred to Adam that he had no idea how long they had been driving. He had no idea how far they had come. Were they even still in California?
He suspected they were. It had been dusk when they’d set out from the temporary camp these soldiers had set up. Now it was night, pitch black outside the windows of the Humvee. It had to be the same night. He couldn’t have slept that long. He would have felt less exhausted if he had.
Ella slowly lowered her hands and looked around warily as Clay, the soldier sitting next to her, unfastened his harness.
“We’re here,” he said.
“We’re where?” Adam asked. “You didn’t tell us where you were taking us.”
“I said we’d be going back to base,” Clay pointed out mildly.
“But you never said where base was.”
“That wasn’t the base we were at before?” Ella asked. They had been at an encampment with several large tents, one of which had been established as a mess hall. Dinner had been served there before they had left. Adam and Ella had eaten warm plates of spaghetti, cooked well and seasoned with spice. Adam remembered the taste of it viscerally.
“We’re about two hours north of where we picked you up,” Clay said. “That was a temporary encampment, but this is our permanent base. Get out of the vehicle. The general will want to meet you both and hear your stories.”
“General?” Adam asked. He had been wrestling with the question of whether to trust these people ever since he’d been picked up, and what he kept returning to was the question of whether they were a real army or not. Someone had been on a crime spree in Northern California. Someone had murdered people violently, terrorized the survivors of the nanovirus that had decimated the population and left few alive. Whoever that person—that gang of people, most likely—was, they had taken pleasure in the violence. Adam didn’t think he would ever forget the mangled state of the bodies they had found outside Ella’s sister’s house.
And every time they had come across an act of violence, they had seen the same graffito: No More Sanctuaries.
Adam didn’t know what those words meant, not in this context. But he did know that one of the soldiers in this army—at least one—had painted the same phrase on his helmet.
He didn’t want to think the worst of these people who had taken him in. He wanted to believe there was safety here. Maybe No More Sanctuaries meant something innocuous. Maybe it was commemorative, and not a threat.
He shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
“What’s he a general of?” he asked Clay as he climbed out of the Humvee.
“He was Air Force, before,” Clay said, and Adam’s spirits lifted slightly. Air Force was a real thing. Air Force wasn’t just a squad of roving gangsters. It was hard to imagine members of the United States Air Force murdering for fun.
He must not be seeing the whole picture yet.
“Jesus,” Ella whispered. She was standing off to the side, staring. “Adam. Do you know what this is?”
Adam turned and looked at the low, concrete bunker behind him, and at the two tall towers with a spherical dome between them. He recognized it at once, but it took his mind a few minutes to fully engage with what he was seeing.
He turned to Clay and raised his eyebrows. “Your base is a nuclear power plant?”
“Is that even safe?” Ella asked.
“You’re not going to grow tentacles or anything,” Clay said, laughing a little. Adam couldn’t help it—he felt himself relax a little further at the sound of Clay’s laughter. “The plant doesn’t generate power anymore.”
“Because of the EMP?” The electromagnetic pulse had been set off weeks ago in an effort to neutralize the nanobots that had caused so many deaths. It had worked as intended, but the tradeoff had been sacrificing all other electronics. Now they lived in a powerless world.
Except for those Humvees, of course. Adam still had no idea how this group had managed that.
“That’s right,” Clay said, as if Adam had made some unusually clever connection. “The core and the fuel rods are still intact
, though.”
Adam had no idea what that meant, scientifically speaking, but he nodded along as if he did. He surveyed the site, taking in the sheer number of people who seemed to be living here. There were massive tents—as big as the one that had served as their mess hall back at the encampment—and Adam could see what looked like squadrons of troops moving into and out of a few of them.
“There are so many of you,” Ella said wonderingly.
“We’re about two thousand strong at the moment,” Clay said.
“Is everyone here Air Force?” Adam asked.
“Not all of us,” Clay said. “But many are. You weren’t from the Force yourself, were you?”
“No, I’m not military,” Adam admitted. He felt a little embarrassed, suddenly. Up until now, he had felt like one of the strongest and most capable people in every group he had joined. He had spent most of the time since the nanovirus broke out in the company of wealthy and privileged people. Ella was the first real exception, and she had also been with him longer than anybody else now.
But in the presence of these soldiers, Adam suddenly felt soft. He was sure that most people who had survived this long had some kind of experience in their background that had fitted them for the new world. What would Clay say if Adam revealed that before the virus had hit he had been a retired actor, a has-been living on the pay from his time on a TV show?
But Clay was looking at him respectfully. “You must have done something right to survive on your own this long,” he said. “Especially without any formal training.”
That was a good point. Adam couldn’t help smiling a little bit. “Well, I’ve been lucky,”
“Sure, luck is always part of it, but it’s never the whole picture,” Clay said. “I’m guessing you’ve had to fight your way out of more than a couple of tough spots since this all started.”
“Yeah,” Adam agreed. “We’ve both been through hell. I guess everyone has at this point, right?”
“It’s easier when you’ve got a team to lean on,” Clay said. “You’ll see. Everyone shows up here at the base all ragged and run down, and within a few weeks they’re closer to being how they were before all this started. You can see people’s personalities start to come back, once they’re not just focusing on how to survive each individual day.”
Adam thought back to the time he had spent on his best friend’s luxury yacht, right after the virus had taken hold. Cody had invited Adam onto his boat to escape the proliferation of the bots, as well as the looting and the violence that had marked the first few weeks. While there, Adam had gotten to know Cody’s hired captain, Artem, a grizzled older man in his fifties. Artem had been a pragmatist, well suited to survival, and he had told Adam once that the only way to keep going was not just to survive but to live.
“The people who are going to survive in this new world will be the ones who can adapt. The ones who can learn how to do more than just keep their bodies going. The ones who can figure out a way to be happy some of the time.”
Wasn’t that what Clay was saying now? The people who stayed here, on the base, they were finding their happiness again. They weren’t just getting through the days.
Artem would have approved.
And they would be safe here. A base this size had to have figured out things like how to feed its people regularly, how to defend its perimeter, how to keep its people secure. Adam tried to remember what it felt like to get through a whole day without fighting for his life or worrying that something was going to kill him.
It had been so long.
He glanced off at one of the tents, not knowing its purpose but imagining it held such magical things as mattresses, sleeping bags, and pillows. There would be a place to sleep here. And there would be the comfort of knowing that nothing would harm him while he slept.
He wanted to stay.
“Come on,” Clay said. “I’ll give you the nickel tour.”
“Of the nuclear facility?” Ella sounded dubious. “I don’t know that we should be in there.”
“I’m not going to show you anything dangerous,” Clay said, grinning. “Don’t you want to see where the toilets are, though? And maybe the mess?”
“Yes,” Adam interjected before Ella could speak again. She was mistrustful by nature, he knew, and she had reason to be—she had been betrayed plenty of times in her past—but there was nothing that could harm them in seeing the restrooms and the mess hall. He might have to convince her about this place. He might have to talk her into giving these people a chance.
He was prepared to do that, if that was what it took.
Clay led them to a small outbuilding that featured men’s restrooms on one side and women’s on the other. Adam went in for a look. The plumbing was old and metallic, and when he turned on one of the sinks, he saw that the water was dark enough to be almost brown in color. Still, he hadn’t used a real toilet since he’d left the Santa Joaquina Country Club with Ella. He indulged himself in the facilities, forced himself to wash his hands under the questionable water, and met up with the others back outside.
“Nice, right?” Clay asked.
“Pretty disgusting,” Adam said with a grin. “But definitely better than finding a tree.”
“I’ll say,” Ella murmured.
“The mess hall is over here.” Clay led them to the single-story square concrete building that Adam had seen when they had arrived. “We’ve got a full kitchen—well, what used to be a full kitchen. The stove is gas, so we can still cook on that. And there’s a whole staff in there who serve three meals a day.”
“You’re kidding.” Adam had grown so used to fending for himself that Clay might as well have told him they were handing out gemstones in the mess hall.
“Nope,” Clay said, grinning easily. “I love showing the mess off to newbies. I’ve had people start crying when they’ve realized they can get food whenever they want it. You two don’t look like you’ve starved,” he said, sizing up Adam and Ella, “but I bet you’ve had to fight for your meals.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Adam said, remembering again the crazed survivalist he had killed. He and Ella had walked away from that encounter with their lives and a few jars of peanut butter, and they had counted it a massive win.
“You’ll be staying in that tent,” Clay said, pointing to a large structure on the west side of the base. “I’ll take you over there in a little bit. That’s where all the newbies go until the general assigns them to a specific squadron.”
“Squadron?” Ella spoke up. “What do you mean, assigns us to a squadron?”
“Well, the general’s going to want you doing something if you’re going to be part of the militia,” Clay said with a laugh, as if it were obvious. “Don’t worry, he takes skill sets into account. Bravo Company is just in charge of cooking. Maybe you’ll join them. It doesn’t mean you have to fight or anything.”
Ella’s jaw locked into place, and Adam recognized the expression on her face. It wasn’t the idea of fighting that she was resisting, it was the idea that she might be required to contribute to this operation when the two of them hadn’t been given a choice about coming here in the first place.
But Adam was thinking back to the early days of the nanovirus, when the government had been scrambling to contain the disaster. Martial law had been declared, he remembered suddenly. Power had been handed over to the military as the crisis worsened. And then the EMP had happened, and Adam was fairly sure martial law had never been formally ended.
That meant the military was still in charge. Not just because they had the guns and the muscle, but because they were supposed to be in charge.
This wasn’t just a random group of people who had bullied Adam and Ella into joining their ranks. This was the group of people that was supposed to be running the show. And by picking up strangers and bringing them into their organization, weren’t they just doing the job of caring for what remained of society?
It would be hard to convince Ella of that.
She had such a problem with authority, having been betrayed by her own parents as a child and by her employer as an adult. She distrusted everyone.
But Adam was feeling more hopeful than he had in weeks.
What if they could finally stop fighting for their lives? What if they could relax and let the rightful government of California—this militia—be responsible for their safety?
What if, at long last, they could just live?
Escape the Dark Book 4: Caught in the Crossfire is available on Amazon now
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ALSO BY K. M. FAWKES
ESCAPE THE DARK
Dark Tides
Fearful World
Into the Ruins
Caught in the Crossfire
Do or Die
ENTER DARKNESS
The Longest Night
Dead of Winter
The Survivors
Thin Ice
First Light
AT ANY COST
Survive The Dark
Fight For Everything
Bleak Horizons
Escape The Dark (Book 3): Into The Ruins Page 16