Collapse Series (Book 10): State of Hope

by Summer Lane

  I lift my head and crawl to my knees, sore and dry, rolling into the bottom of the ditch. I blink against the early sunlight and sit upright. The ditch is taller than I thought. I crawl out of it, popping my head over the muddy lip. I see nothing but the open fields and the abandoned lighthouse. The sea is a small, blue smudge on the horizon. I see nothing and no one, but I can taste. I grit my teeth together, my mouth filled with dirt. I spit, then fumble for my canteen, slaking my monstrous thirst.

  Once I’m done, I rise to my feet. I limp forward and shake my muscles out, easing the stiffness away.

  “Whiskey Leader,” I say, quietly into my radio. “Do you read me? Over.”

  Nothing but static.

  I curse, then continue through the grass, looking for signs of the rest of the team. I see a footprint here and there, and I realize, grimly, that despite my ability to track, there are too many Omega prints mingled with ours.

  We could be miles apart…some of my team may have been picked up by Omega…

  I shudder, forcing the thought out of my head.

  No! We will make it out of this alive!

  I know that if anyone was taken, they will be executed…but not before they are brutally tortured by Omega for information on the militias.

  I continue walking.

  The confusion of last night whirls in my head…the attack, the drones, the patrols…how did they know where we were? Or did they simply get lucky? I don’t believe it. Something must have tipped us off…but what?

  Four weeks, I remind myself. You have four weeks to find the first family: four weeks to keep President Banner in check. Four weeks before the convention on the coast with the rest of the states. You can do this.

  No, I can’t. Not without my team—

  Whirrrrrrreeeee!

  A birdcall. I know that sound!

  I whirl around, searching the grass swaying in the breeze, the touch of morning still hanging over the hills, making everything slightly hazy. I see the minute flash of shadow, a tiny detail that only a few could spot.

  “Uriah,” I say.

  He is there, rising out of the tall grass, as silent as the wind. His face is mired in mud, and his bandana is tied around his forehead, soaked, too. I breathe a sigh of relief and we embrace. He holds me tightly, exhaling.

  “Thank God,” he mutters. “No one is responding-”

  “I know,” I reply. “Have you seen anyone else?”

  “No.”

  I pull back, gathering myself.

  “We have to keep going,” I say. “The RV pickup point is in four weeks…the rest of the team will catch up with us. We can’t stop.”

  He understands.

  I force a smile, and then I bend over, hands on my knees.

  “Cassidy?” Uriah asks, alarmed. “Hey, are you okay?”

  He pulls my hair back, and I struggle to catch my breath.

  “I’m just…worried,” I say. “About the rest of the team. About everyone.”

  “Everyone is incredibly self-sufficient and smart,” Uriah replies, kneeling beside me. “They can take care of themselves. Trust them to do that. We’ll circle around, search for anyone else.”

  He trails off, looking into the distance.

  I see Vera and Andrew moving quickly across the marsh, slicked in mud and gunk – but alive and well.

  “Thank God!” I exclaim. “You’re okay!”

  Andrew stumbles, obviously exhausted, and Vera places a steadying hand on his arm.

  “They’ve been taken,” she heaves, a tear trickling down her cheek.

  “Who?” Uriah asks.

  “The Angels. Em, Elle, Cheng, Manny…probably Bravo, too.” Vera actually cries. “I saw it happen. There were just too many…we got away, but…they’re gone.”

  I stare at her, shocked.

  “No,” I murmur, anger and frustration firing me. “This can’t happen.”

  But it has happened.

  Other than the four of us, the Angels of Death have been taken hostage.

  Chapter Twelve

  The shock of the Angels’ capture is electric. We spend a few moments in disbelief, praying and hoping that somehow this can’t be true. But it is. Andrew and Vera sit down as I pace, working out our next move.

  What do we do now?

  “Movement,” Uriah says.

  I drop to the ground, into the high grass. I follow Uriah’s line of sight and see what he sees…Omega soldiers milling around the outside of the cluster of buildings at the base of the lighthouse – a remainder of the forces that attacked us last night?

  “It is an outpost,” I say.

  I notice something.

  “The sign is gone,” I point out. “The one asking for help. They took it down.”

  “It was a premeditated trap,” Andrew whispers. “They totally knew we were coming…”

  “Come on,” I say, shouldering my rifle. “Let’s go have a little chat with the soldiers on duty. Maybe they can help us find the others.”

  “Doubtful,” Vera replies.

  I throw her a sour look, pushing my worries and doubts about our lost friends out of my head. I focus my next move on something that may help them, and we slowly move toward the buildings.

  We circle around the back of the lighthouse, shadowing the cluster of buildings. I move over the fence, and Uriah and the rest move in behind me. We crouch beneath the windows, and I listen:

  Voices. I hear conversation inside, careless and loud.

  I nod to Uriah and we leapfrog toward the entrance. Vera takes my shoulder, and Andrew takes Uriah’s. The door is unguarded –sloppy, I think, – and then Uriah kicks in the door, and we are inside.

  The room is small, basic. There are three Omega troops inside, standing around a table, clutching mugs of coffee. There are a few maps, and a large radio and computer in the corner.

  The first one screams, grabbing at his gun, coffee mugs clattering against the floor.

  Uriah shoots him, kills him.

  The second one is faster, and he manages to get off a shot at us. Andrew jerks left, narrowly avoiding the bullet. It crashes through the window instead. Vera and I shoot the guard at the same time, and he falls dead. Vera looks at me, grinning slightly, and then Uriah shoots the third in the leg, and he pins him to the floor.

  I kneel over him and grab his gun, tossing it aside.

  “All right,” Uriah growls. “Let’s play a game, shall we?”

  He hauls the trooper upright by the collar of his shirt and shoves him in a chair.

  “Vera, watch the door,” I murmur.

  She nods, staking herself by the entrance, scanning the horizon for potential threats.

  I scan the maps on the walls, recognizing different areas of California. But the maps remain unmarked, and aside from the radio and computer, there is nothing else to look at in this room.

  “We’re going to play twenty questions,” Uriah says, holding the muzzle of his handgun against the soldier’s temple. “I’ll start.”

  The soldier is shaking and crying. Snot streams from his nose, running over his mouth. Blood oozes from his leg, spreading across the floor.

  “How did you know we were here?” he demands. “Why were the patrols waiting for us?”

  “I speak…little English…” the guard stutters. “I…cannot…answer…”

  “You speak enough,” Uriah spits, tightening his grip on his collar, driving the gun into his skin. “How did you know we were here? Is this an outpost for the Athena Strike? How long have you been here?”

  The guard is young. Barely seventeen or eighteen years old.

  He only stares at Uriah.

  Uriah glances at me and then holds the gun to the soldier’s right knee.

  “Talk or you lose your leg,” Uriah warns.

  The soldier’s eyes widen.

  “We are only a small outpost!” he blurts. His accent is heavy, but his English is clearly better than he claimed. “I am stationed here…only to watch for…enemy pa
trols and scouts. That is all!”

  “THEN HOW DID YOU KNOW WE WERE HERE?”

  The soldier swallows.

  “We…received…a transmission,” he grits, trembling. “Our commanding officer…told us to expect…the Angels…of Death…”

  I share an uneasy glance with Andrew.

  “You are going to kill me, yes?” the soldier asks, without hesitation.

  “Probably,” I reply. “Who is your commanding officer?”

  “General Titan,” he answers.

  “Who the hell is General Titan?” Uriah demands. “What kind of a name-”

  “He is the chancellor’s best general,” the soldier coughs. “Where he gets his intel from…I…do…not know.”

  This is something I believe, and I say, “How many more patrols are on the coast right now?”

  The soldier hesitates.

  Uriah smacks him across the face with his gun, cracking his nose. Blood pours down his face, and he screams in pain.

  Andrew winces.

  “The patrols…who attacked…you…” the soldier spits. “They are… from the Athena flagship…the chancellor’s…best…squadron…”

  “Veronica knew we would be here and she sent her best men to kill us,” I say, frowning. “Where is the first family? I know Veronica has them, and I have a feeling you know where they are.”

  At this, the soldier snaps his mouth shut.

  “Hey,” Uriah says, pulling him closer to his face. “I will remove your leg from your body if you don’t tell us what we want to know. The commander asked you a question: so speak up.”

  The soldier – and now I notice that his nametag reads Nunes – swallows and looks away. “I cannot say,” he suddenly says. “It would…be…worth my life.”

  Uriah rolls his eyes.

  “Yeah,” he says. “It will be.”

  He pulls the trigger on his handgun. I jump backward, taken by surprise. Nunes screams, clutching his knee…but he’s fine. Uriah has simply fired a shot into the floor.

  “Next shot goes into you kneecap,” Uriah threatens. “TALK.”

  Nunes is almost sobbing, now, shaking with terror.

  “The first family is with Chancellor Klaus!” he screams. “They are always with her, always! She likes to keep…them…close.”

  “On board the Athena flagship?” I press. “Nunes? Where?”

  He stares at me.

  “They are being…moved,” he gasps. “Into Compound C.”

  Andrew walks to the wall, placing his finger on a map.

  “That’s here in California,” he says. “It’s Omega’s last stronghold in the state.” He looks at Nunes. “Why would Veronica move inland? She’s in enemy territory, now.”

  Nunes coughs again, this time spitting up blood.

  “The Chancellor is…wise and cunning…” He looks at me, then, and he smiles. It is a strange smile, his teeth covered in blood and his eyes glazed over. “She’s here to kill you all. Every last one of you.”

  Here, his English is perfect, and Uriah’s grip on the gun tightens.

  “Uriah,” I say.

  He loosens his hold.

  I chew on my lower lip, studying him for a moment, and then I realize something.

  “Veronica is here to oversee the Athena Strike, isn’t she?” I say. “God, she’s moving in because she thinks she’s going to be able to stay…but she’s keeping the first family with her as insurance to bargain with President Banner if it comes to that.”

  “Andrew, where is Compound C?” I ask.

  “Roughly 200 miles from where we are now,” Andrew replies. “We’d head south, and it’s approximately where Kettleman City used to be. Omega has set up a command post there, lots of security. It would make sense to move Veronica there over anywhere else in the state.”

  “That would be two to three days on foot,” I muse. “How many men are stationed at Compound C?”

  “Two hundred,” Nunes replies, not missing a beat. “Not even the Angels of Death could get in – Compound C…is very heavily guarded…protected…not easily – what is the word? – breached.”

  “We’ll see about that,” I tell him. “When are Veronica and the first family being moved?”

  Nunes says, “They were moved last night.”

  Every move Veronica has made in the last twenty-four hours has been in response to our movements, I think.

  “Someone’s leaking intel to the Chancellor,” I say. “We’ve got a rat in the nest.”

  Uriah curses.

  This realization is hauntingly familiar – there is always a traitor, always a double agent lurking in our ranks. It could be anyone…I mean, the attacks in Camp Cambria that took Chris’s life were pulled off by traitors that had infiltrated Sector 13’s own ranks.

  No one can be trusted.

  “Let’s get real,” Andrew points out. “Only a handful of people knew about this operation – us, Admiral Boyd, the President, and Commander Miller.”

  “I don’t want any of them to be traitors,” I say.

  “We can rule out the president, most likely,” Andrew surmises. “Only because this is his family we’re rescuing…but it could be Boyd.”

  “God, it could be Beckham,” I answer.

  And then I swear, and I kick the wall.

  “It could be anyone,” I say. “All we can do now is roll with the punches and make our next move.”

  “Where did they take our men?” Uriah asks Nunes. “The other strike team members – the Angels of Death the patrols picked up? Where are they being kept?”

  At this, Nunes shakes his head.

  “This, I cannot tell you…” he laughs. “Your militias killed…my brother…he was in San Francisco and he…died in the battle there.” He spits on Uriah’s cheek. “Your friends will die…like my brother died.”

  This time, Uriah is unstoppable. He pulls the trigger of his gun. The shot is shockingly loud in the small confines of the building, and Nunes screams inhumanely, writhing in the chair, falling to the ground. Blood and pieces of bone smear across the floor, his knee and leg ripped apart. He is sobbing uncontrollably, arching his back, choking on his own screams and turning pale white with the shock of the injury.

  He will die fast, judging by the amount of blood spilling onto the ground.

  “WHERE ARE THEY?” Uriah yells, standing over him.

  Nunes cries, “They’re with her! COMPOUND C! I swear to God that’s where they are!”

  His English – supposedly broken – is perfect now, and he continues to scream with pain.

  “I think we got everything we need to know,” Uriah says.

  I turn away from Nunes, walking to the radio.

  Uriah fires the gun one more time, and then Nunes is silent.

  Dead – Uriah has finished him.

  I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and sit at the computer. I turn the monitor on. A black grid pops up, each focused on different areas of the coastline.

  “It’s a satellite feed,” Andrew realizes, awed. “Are you seeing this, Uriah?”

  Uriah holsters his gun, stonily surveying the computer.

  I see different angles of every area of the California coastline, realizing that I recognize many of them – including San Diego and the NHS on Coronado Island.

  “They are all-seeing,” I whisper.

  I click on a link in the lower right-hand corner, and I am taken to another page filled with thousands – if not millions – of smaller links.

  “What is this?” I wonder.

  “More satellite feeds,” Andrew states, eyes widening. “Oh. My. God.”

  He leans over my shoulder and opens one link after another. Scene after scene flashes across the screen in different windows – feeds from all over the state, all over the coast, and all over the country.

  “Eyes in the sky,” Uriah mutters.

  I stand up.

  “They can see everything,” I say. “They’ve always been able to see, haven’t they?”

>   Andrew doesn’t reply.

  All this time, I knew Omega had technology that we couldn’t spot. I didn’t know about the drones until recently…but this? This is terrifying. This means that they’ve been watching us since the beginning, keeping tabs on our movements, watching our convoys, our patrols…

  And then a thought even more terrifying hits:

  Have they been controlling us all this time? Baiting our troops, allowing us to win some battles that they pre-picked, just to give us false hope, to purposefully steer us in a different direction?

  The realization is horrifying, and I have to push the thought away. If I allow myself to believe – even for a moment – that the fight against Omega has been only an illusion, I cannot survive.

  “We have to torch this place,” I say. “And then we have to get to Compound C and find the others, find Veronica, and find the first family.”

  Andrew sits down at the computer and fiddles with it for a while. He checks the radio and then digs in his pack for explosives.

  Outside the window, I see an Omega pickup parked near the front of the property.

  “I found our ride,” I say.

  We set the explosives, and I am careful not to look at Nunes’s dead body on the floor as we leave. The only trace of him is the blood stuck to the bottom of my boots, pressing red prints against the sidewalk.

  Andrew checks his watch, turning to Vera.

  “Five minutes,” he says. “Let’s scram.”

  Andrew slides into the driver’s seat and checks the radio. He rips open the paneling and pulls a white disk from the collection of wires and motherboards.

  “Vehicle tracker,” he explains. He tosses it out the window. Vera climbs into the passenger seat, and I climb into the back with Uriah. Andrew guns the engine and floors it. We speed away from the lighthouse, and when it’s little more than a speck in the distance, I hear the detonation. I look in the rearview mirror, seeing nothing but a burst of black smoke and flames on the horizon.

  ***

  Vera keeps a map in her hand as we navigate through the abandoned roads in the coastal foothills. My thoughts are jumbled. I’m worried about Manny, Elle, Em, Cheng, and Bravo. How could all of them be captured? I pray that they’re not already dead – that we can get to them in time.