Apocalypse Assassins: The Complete Series

by D. Laine

  But most of all? I was mad at the Preppers. They were to blame for everything.

  It had taken me a few days, but I could now confidently pin my parents’ murders on them. During all the chaos of learning the truth about the agency and escaping the mob of Preppers, I had failed to see the connection, but now it was clear.

  What I had always known was that whoever had taken my sister had also killed my parents. Why it had taken me three damn days to connect the dots could be blamed on the fact that I was really distracted by a lot of other shit. A strong case could be made that I was in denial—because my sister was a willing member of the Preppers’ group. She had even fallen in love with one of them. Either they had brainwashed her, or she forgave them for what they had done.

  I couldn’t forgive. I couldn’t overlook their actions. My distrust of them had only grown in the days since I first learned of their existence.

  And now, because of them, I drove through my home state, which I had once loved, with a scowl on my face. I would never enjoy the sight of Utah again . . . because of them.

  Thea reached across the console to squeeze my arm, and I forced the glower off my face before I looked at her.

  “You okay?”

  I nodded, but she didn’t buy it.

  “Want to talk about it?”

  I started to shake my head before I remembered my promise to her. No lies. No secrets. While my thoughts weren’t exactly either of those, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to tell her. It may even help.

  “The Preppers are to blame for everything,” I said. Stealing a glance, I saw her brow crease. “I mean, not everything as in everything. Obviously, Spence is to blame for most of this mess. I mean personally. The Preppers killed my parents. They took Sadie from me. They took you from Jake. We’re on the run right now because of them.”

  “Do you believe everything they told you?”

  I took a moment to think about my answer. Calvin was the one who told us we were vessels for the Watchers. Calvin told us what the Watchers wanted and how the others had avoided that fate by injecting themselves with demon blood. I had seen the marks behind Ewing’s and Robbie’s ears that night. I had seen it on my sister. Like Thea, they all carried the blood of a Watcher and a demon. Aside from what Calvin told us, none of us really knew what that meant.

  But saying that would probably only freak Thea out. So I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I believe some of it.”

  Calvin had been right about Spence, at least. His own brother—my commanding officer and the agency’s leader—had been Lucifer’s vessel all along. Spence had aligned us for the ultimate showdown between Lucifer and the Watchers, one he arrogantly assumed he would win. He had nearly gotten away with his plan before his master decided to cut ties and go with another vessel—because, of course, Lucifer would have spare vessels laying around.

  Calvin claimed he could no longer be Lucifer’s vessel, thanks to the Watcher blood he had injected himself with, but did I believe him? If not him, who was it?

  Then there was the question of what consequences those carrying both blood types would face, if any. Calvin had hinted at something happening to them when the Watchers made a power move, but he didn’t know what. Considering both Thea and Sadie could potentially be affected, I wasn’t satisfied with Calvin’s non-answer.

  “I still think Calvin is hiding something,” I told Thea.

  “You don’t trust them at all, do you?” Thea glanced into the back seat, where Robbie was still out cold. Or rather hot. According to Jake, she was burning and sweaty.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror and found Jake’s eyes on me, waiting.

  “She’s never given me any reason to distrust her,” I said, referencing Robbie. “Aside from holding a gun to my head when we first met. She did help us evade Calvin.”

  “And Ewing?” Thea pressed.

  I suppressed a growl in my throat. “Yeah, I don’t care if he helped. I don’t like him.”

  Thea took on that soft, rational voice of reason you would expect to hear from a licensed therapist. “But do you think that might have more to do with his relationship with your sister than his role as a Prepper?”

  “That’s part of it. He also has a big mouth.”

  Jake snorted behind me. Glancing in the mirror again, I saw him nod his head at me while speaking to Thea. “I think Kong has finally met his Godzilla.”

  “Ah.” She settled into her seat with a twinkle in her eyes. “Didn’t they make a movie about that?”

  “Yep.” I nodded once. “I watched it, too.”

  “Who won?”

  I turned to gape at her. “Who do you think?” As if there was ever any doubt. Kong all the way.

  Thea peered out the windshield with a smile. “Just don’t carry me to the top of some skyscraper the next time you—” She cut herself off abruptly and darted a glance into the backseat, where Jake was doing his damnedest to ignore the turn this discussion had taken.

  I, on the other hand, was intrigued. Thea’s eyes shot to mine, and I hooked an eyebrow. “The next time I . . . what? I’d love to hear the end of that statement.”

  “I vote for her to not finish that thought,” Jake grumbled.

  Thea ignored us both in favor of the bleak view out the window. Finally, she said, “Just don’t take out an entire city in your fight with Godzilla.”

  I laughed. “No worries. I won’t take hostages, and I promise there will be no casualties. Well . . . maybe one.” Thea speared me with a look, and I grinned. “I’m kidding.”

  And I was . . . for the most part. But I wouldn’t shed any tears over Ewing either.

  HOURS LATER, the sun lit the eastern sky an interesting blend of pink and orange. I spent more time gazing at the horizon than I did watching the road. It wasn’t all that difficult, considering it was nothing more than a narrow strip of blacktop spread in a straight line across a flat and open basin. There were few abandoned cars to avoid, because no one had ever driven out here.

  The abundance of WARNING and NO TRESPASSING signs dotting the landscape really did a number on local tourism. Growing up near the highly classified military base that encompassed nearly the entire northwest corner of Utah, I had learned that the signs were not there for show. They were not hollow threats.

  You did not venture off the road in hopes of getting a peek at something to run home and tell your friends and the newspapers about. If you tried, you got your ass shot.

  Dugway Proving Grounds was no joke. Cutting across the desert even remotely close to their base was not an ideal choice considering the heightened level of national security induced by the recent events, but we had no other options unless we wanted to backtrack a hundred miles into Nevada to take the southern route. We couldn’t risk expending the vehicles’ batteries in the process. We needed to inch closer to Calvin, and ultimately figure out what he was hiding.

  So we took the only public highway, which also happened to cut through nearly a million acres of prohibited, military-controlled desert. I didn’t know what was left of Dugway, or if anyone alive remained at the base. But I wasn’t about to stop or wander off the road in search of survivors. I wasn’t suicidal.

  The Dugway guys didn’t particularly like us. Spence had always cautioned us to steer clear of this area when we were sent out on missions. He never told us what they knew, or how much they knew, about the agency’s presence at Area 51. The flyboys at Nellis, the government, and the media had all been duped by our cover stories, but Dugway?

  I had always suspected they knew more than we thought.

  The theory had crossed my mind that the dead tags left behind in Wendover had been killed by a group out of Dugway. Which meant we had another potential enemy in the area.

  Fortunately, the road didn’t take us anywhere near their main gate. I drove us straight through no-man’s-land, where biological and chemical traps awaited anyone stupid enough to veer off course. I stuck to the highway like any smart man would.

  W
e left the danger zone behind without spotting any sign of military presence in the area, and I started to relax. Thirty miles outside Salt Lake City, my jaw tensed for an entirely different reason. A personal reason. A painfully personal reason.

  I vividly recalled how the view in front of me had looked through young, innocent eyes. A bit bigger, and greener. Definitely a lot less gray. The sense of coming home was every bit as bitter as I expected it to be.

  Then Jake yelled from the back seat, and I had a bigger problem than unwanted memories to worry about. Behind me, Robbie’s head pounded the side of the car with a series of rapid, bone-crunching thuds. Her face twisted with visible agony and her face turned a dark shade of purple while Jake struggled to hold down her flailing legs. A shrill scream tore from her throat, shattering the silence inside the car and sending a chill down my spine.

  “Pull over!” Jake ordered.

  I glanced around at my options. Downtown Salt Lake City was another half hour away. There was a lot of nothing between here and there—which was actually a good thing. That meant less tags to deal with.

  Spotting the entrance to a state park, I whipped the wheel to the right and braked in the gravel beneath a wooden arched sign directing us to a campground. I flung open my door as the second car skidded to a stop behind me. Reaching into the back seat, I took a hold of Robbie’s shoulders and pulled.

  Her body jerked and twisted the entire way through the door and onto the ground, where I laid her gently at my feet. Jake climbed out and promptly took my place. He applied gentle pressure to her shoulders to keep her from cracking her head open on the ground.

  “What happened?” Sadie asked behind me.

  “I don’t know. This came out of nowhere.” I stared down at Robbie in confusion before turning to look at my sister. My throat tightened when I saw the dark circles under her eyes and the red flush of her cheeks. “Sadie?”

  Her glassy eyes lifted to mine. “I don’t feel so good.”

  “You don’t look so good.” I turned to shoot an accusatory glare at Ewing, but I didn’t see him. Maria and Marcus were the closest, so they got it instead. “How long has she been like this?”

  Maria shrugged. “I’ve been asleep.”

  Marcus shook his head. “I’ve been driving. I had no idea.”

  I finally spotted Ewing on the other side of the vehicle, leaning against an open door. He held his head in his hands and looked up with a moan.

  “I think it’s happening,” he muttered.

  “What?”

  At my feet, Robbie stilled. I glanced down to confirm she wasn’t dead. Jake removed his fingers from the pulse in her neck with a small nod, but his eyes remained grim.

  “We’re finally experiencing the effects of having both Watcher and demon blood in us,” Ewing explained, prompting me to whip around to face him. “The Watchers must be preparing to make a move.”

  I snorted. Then I glanced at Sadie, and saw the resignation in her eyes. She believed him. Whether or not I believed Ewing didn’t matter when Sadie’s legs buckled beneath her.

  My hands shot out to catch her, sparing her from a hard fall to the ground. Her head rolled back, draped over my arm, and I saw that her eyes were squeezed shut. Beads of sweat collected on her forehead.

  “Shit.” I eased Sadie to the ground beside Robbie, and she didn’t move.

  It was the same thing we had seen happen to Robbie. Labored breathing. Weak pulse. Unconscious.

  Ewing looked like he would be next. Unless Thea . . .

  I shot to my feet a split second before Jake and rounded the front of the car to yank her door open. My quick reflexes kept her from tumbling out.

  “I had thought she was asleep,” I muttered. “God dammit, I thought she’d fallen asleep.”

  All this time, Thea had been unconscious and running a hell of a fever in the seat beside me. If she followed in Robbie’s footsteps, she would be convulsing within the hour.

  I looked up to meet Jake’s worry-lined eyes, hoping he would know what to do.

  “We need to get them somewhere safe,” he said.

  I agreed, but had to question, where would we ever find safety?

  OUR SAFEST OPTION was the vehicles. That would not work once the others started thrashing and convulsing. The confined space guaranteed a few broken bones and bloody noses. Since we had no idea how long this would go on, or what other surprises awaited us, we opted to find somewhere else to seek shelter. Our next best option was to go camping.

  The state park we had coincidentally stopped near provided us with decent protection. Half a mile from the main road, nestled between a patch of woods to our south and the large lake the nearby city was named after to our north, we found a small campground. We helped ourselves to the most secluded cabin on the grounds, on the border of a thick patch of trees, and prepared to hunker down.

  Hopefully not for long. Though secluded, we were still way too close to a major urban area likely overflowing with tags to be comfortable.

  The cabin came with three bedrooms. While Marcus and Maria secured a perimeter outside, Jake and I moved the unconscious girls into what was obviously the kiddie room with its narrow beds and ABC-themed wallpaper. Ewing held on long enough to ensure all three were safely tucked away before he fell out on the floor in the living room.

  Jake helped me to lift him onto the couch. Then we stared at each other with matching dumbfounded looks.

  Jake managed to form words first. “What’s happening?”

  I had no answer.

  The door swung open behind me, and Maria poked her head inside. “Perimeter looks clear, but it’s going to take two of us to keep a secure watch ҆round the clock.”

  I ran a hand over my face. “We can do five or six hour shifts before switching out.”

  In other words, the four of us were going to be in a constant state of exhaustion for the unforeseeable future.

  Maria nodded her head as she backed outside and shut the door behind her. Jake started after her, muttering something about getting something to eat from the car. I wasn’t hungry.

  I wandered down the narrow hallway, bypassing the two larger bedrooms with the bigger, fluffier beds, and pushed open the door to the pint-sized room holding our most precious cargo. Thea and Sadie—two of the three people I would do anything for.

  Not that I didn’t like Robbie. I just didn’t know if I could trust her, while the two currently passed out on matching rainbow-colored bedspreads had big claims on my heart I wasn’t prepared to part with.

  I stopped to brush the sweat-matted hair off my sister’s forehead as I passed by her bed. Staring down at her face, relaxed in sleep, I couldn’t help but recall the dozens of memories I had of waking up to her big green eyes peering at me. She had always been an early riser, whereas I liked my sleep. Five minutes of listening to her beg me to get up and play whatever make-believe roles she had cooked up had always done the trick.

  “Come on, Sadie,” I whispered to her now. “I need you to get better and wake up. We’re not playing this time. We’ve got big dangers out there, and I don’t know how to protect you from them if you don’t wake up.”

  I expected no response, and that was exactly what I got.

  On the other bottom bunk, Thea groaned. I shifted a few inches to sit on the edge of her mattress. My gaze dropped to where her hands clenched at her sides, and a sense of helplessness crept in with a surge of dread. I knew what was coming, and I was ready for it.

  Physically. Not mentally.

  When her body locked up, I sprang into action. I went through the motions of holding her as still as I could while she bucked and writhed against whatever invisible threat assaulted her fragile body. Physically, I did what I had to do. Inside, I died a little.

  When it finally ended and her body stilled, I had nothing left to give. Emotionally and mentally drained, I curled onto my side, tucked Thea’s head under my chin, and did everything in my power to hold myself together.

  For t
he first time in ten years, I nearly fucking cracked.

  4

  DYLAN

  Forty-eight hours later, I was a ticking time bomb, and Maria was one finger jab away from setting me off.

  “I’m only suggesting that you be careful.” With one hand fisted on her hip, and the other waving the gun in her hand around like a crazy person, she loomed over me where I sat in a wooden chair, staring at the floor. “We have no idea what they’ll be capable of when they wake up—if they ever wake up. In the meantime, we’re sitting ducks while we wait for them.”

  “Get out of my face, Maria.” The gravelly tone of my voice should have been enough of a warning. She had heard it before. She had seen what came next, and it was never pretty when I lost my temper.

  But she wasn’t backing down. “Open your eyes, Dylan. See what’s in front of you. Don’t be blinded by—”

  My eyes snapped up. “By what, Maria? Love? Why is that such a hard concept for you to understand?”

  “Love? Ha!” She laughed sardonically. “You found someone who can wet your dick on a regular basis in the middle of an apocalypse. That’s gratification, Dylan. Not love.”

  I stared at her, hard. For the first time since all the animosity started with her, I really tried to figure out what was bothering Maria. Maybe Thea was right. Maybe Maria was simply jealous. I didn’t recall getting any vibes that she had wanted more from me when we hooked up, but maybe I had missed something. Because something was seriously going on here.

  “What is it, Maria?” I channeled every ounce of patience I could muster into keeping my voice level and calm. “Why do you hate Thea so much?”

  “Aside from the fact that we’re sitting here, fending off the occasional lost tag, while she snores away in that room?”

  “Along with my sister, Robbie, and that dipshit,” I gritted, swinging a finger at Ewing, where he lay sprawled on the couch.