They only had seven more minutes before that Canadian missile hit.
Jillian went to open her door, but Reginald shook his head. “Look.”
She scanned the tall fence that surrounded the building and the concrete “skirt” that was the buffer between the street and the entrance. It looked clear. Then she saw it. A hand. A bloody hand over to the side. Just the hand.
Raptors. They weren’t all that fond of extremities.
“Why would the raptors be here?” Jillian moaned.
It had been meant as a rhetorical question but the look on Reginald’s face made it a practical question.
“Reginald?”
He wouldn’t look at her.
“We baited the area with sides of beef to draw the raptors to the area.”
Jillian felt her stomach sink again. It was easy to forget the traitor that Reginald had become. He might be helping her now, but he’d helped author mankind’s destruction.
“I’m going to crash through the gate and bring us right up to front doors.”
Not being able to find her voice amongst the anger and hurt, Jillian just nodded.
Reginald revved the engine. Jillian could imagine all of those diplomats rushing over here. The raptors must have keyed off on the migration over here and had their own impromptu buffet.
Shifting into gear, Reginald gunned it, turning into the chain link gate, smashing through it. That must have been a signal to the raptor as four burst from the brush and charged the car. Their long white teeth snapping at Jillian’s window. Luckily they didn’t have the power to knock the vehicle over.
Reginald turned the wheel, skidding them sideways, stopping just inches from the door.
“Go,” Reginald urged handing over the gun to her.
“What about you?” Jillian asked even though she really shouldn’t care.
“Go!” Reginald yelled, opening the side door by remote control and shoving her out.
Jillian stumbled onto the concrete as one of the raptors tried to wedge its head in sideways between the Jeep and the building. She couldn’t worry about her traitorous synthetic anymore.
The front door was locked which actually gave her hope the inside of the building was dinosaur-free. There wasn’t time to do anything else so she raised the gun and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
The safety was still on. Good thing that happened before she was up against a raptor. Using her thumb, she clicked off the safety and shot the window out. She ducked to avoid the large shards and felt glass crunch under her heels.
Rushing into the lobby she spotted the stairs and ran past the tempered glass reception desk. No body parts. So far not as bad as it could have been. Panting, she hit the door at a run and grabbed the hand railing and swung around to trot down the stairs. She had twenty floors to go.
Jillian wasn’t even sure if she could jump start the cryotube, but she had to try at this point. She was down to six minutes.
Her thoughts flittered to Reginald. She found herself worried about him. Her heart hadn’t caught up with her new reality. He had been her right hand for so many years. She thought she’d known him. She had been one of the most vocal advocates for robot rights. Little did she know they were planning on taking them by force. Not by force but by nuclear obliteration of the human race.
Reginald’s upper crust British accent was no longer adorable.
A heel broke under her, nearly causing her to tumble down the stairs. Only her death grip on the railing kept her upright. Kicking off both shoes, she resumed her headlong flight down to the twentieth floor.
Thank god it was downhill. She could feel her nylons ripping as she ran, but at this point it was of little consequence.
Finally she made it down to the bottom floor. There were all kinds of biohazard signs plastered on the door. And a huge “employees only” placard.
Yah, a little late for that.
She tested the door. It was locked. Jillian peered through the small window, trying to see if anyone still alive was in there.
A raptor’s mouth crashed into the glass, shattering it. Jillian threw her hands up, protecting her face as she back away.
How could the dinosaurs have gotten so deep into the facility?
Worse, the raptor’s attack must have hit some kind of “open” button as the door cycled through red to yellow. Green had to be next.
Jillian raised her gun, tucking herself next to the hinges so when the door flashed green and swung open, she had some protection between herself and the raptor. Thankfully the raptors had a certain intelligence. Figuring out how to get around the door, wasn’t one of them. It charged straight ahead, seeming confused where Jillian had gotten to. As the large creature tried to turn around, Jillian got out from behind the door, and raced into the room, slamming the door behind her.
As the raptor hit the door, she locked it.
Squealing in that high-pitched voice of theirs, the raptor screamed its frustration.
A responding call came from behind Jillian.
She turned slowly to find another raptor coming at her from behind one of the cryo tubes. Body parts were strewn all over the grey tile floor. This had been a slaughterhouse. The diplomat’s sanctuary had become their mausoleum.
The raptor clicked her claw. The dinosaur’s little “you are so screwed” signal.
Jillian raised her weapon. The bullets would never penetrate the raptor’s thick skull, however Jillian wasn’t aiming at the raptor. She fired at the cryo tube next to the raptor.
Liquid nitrogen poured out of the tube, flash freezing the raptor’s left side. The beast screamed, thrashing its head around, trying to get its left limbs to work. Jillian wasn’t going to let that happen.
She fired again, this time at the frozen half of the dinosaur. The raptor shattered in half. Tiny bits of frozen raptor flew across the room. The dinosaur looked stunned for a moment.
Sure you might be kicking our ass right now, Jillian thought. But I’m still slightly smarter than you. Effer.
The raptor tipped over, dead. She raced past the carcass, saying a silent “sorry” to the cryo-tube’s occupant. Although it had only been a head so she wasn’t all that worried. Come on. A head? At what point after a nuclear winter would they be able to wake up a head?
Or was she being equally unrealistic. Sure they could freeze people, but waking them up again without being complete Jell-O or brain dead. That was another thing.
She could only hope the robots figured it out before someone tried to wake her up.
Finding an open tube, Jillian tried to figure out the instructions. Clearly they had been written by someone with an in-depth knowledge of cryogenesis to be read by someone with an in-depth knowledge of cryogenesis. Knowledge she did not have. Most of the instructions were in acronyms that made absolutely no sense to her.
Jillian was about to hit a button when the door burst open. She turned, gun raised ready to fire but it wasn’t a raptor, it was Reginald, with a raptor right behind him.
“Don’t,” Reginald yelled, waving her off.
She wasn’t sure he meant don’t hit the button or don’t shoot. She did neither.
The robot looked like hell. Normally Reginald was as dapper as could be. His fresh starched shirts and oxford leather shoes.
Now he was missing one ear and had a huge gouge out of his face. His left hand was mangled and he listed to the side since his right foot was missing.
The raptor took a bite at Reginald but the protocol robot took an even larger swing at the dinosaur, snapping the raptor’s head back. The raptor stumbled to the side just long enough for Reginald to spin around, grab a large steel wrench and drive it into the raptor’s ear. It was one of the few “kill zones” on the creatures. The bone was thinner there so Jillian was able to hear the loud “crack” as the bone fractured, allowing the wrench to pass into the brain cavity.
Kind of like a chicken with its head cut off, the raptor still stumbled forward, gnashing its teeth, emit
ting a blood curling death cry. A responding cry came from down the hallway. Reginald shut and locked the door before raptor number three could make its way to them.
A timer went off on Reginald’s watch.
“We’ve only got four minutes. Get in.”
She had trusted him so far. She had to trust him now. Jillian jumped into the tube just as Reginald hit the controls to lay the tube on its back. Just as she reclined, she noticed a monitor showing the NY skyline. She could see the missile heading in from the north.
Then mist covered her vision and cold bit her nose. Wasn’t there something more to this? Then she could see nothing but white frost as the mechanism whirred to life.
Only at the last moment did a small window clear. Enough for her to see her precious city go up in a giant mushroom cloud. It took a few seconds before she felt the shock wave and watched as the room shook and Reginald fell out of view.
Then she was alone in her white, freezing tube.
Her last thoughts were of her family.
Would she ever see them again?
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ROGUE SPEAR: The prequel short story to the upcoming new Nuclear Proliferation series
CHAPTER 1
Captain Vanessa, “Van” Trajen stood atop the makeshift rampart of her unit’s field camp. Given that they were in deep Taliban territory the fence was six feet high with another three feet or razor wire topping out at nearly nine feet high.
Somehow she still didn’t feel exactly safe. The camp was nearly emptied out as the other teams were in the field performing various missions. Some recon, some on active assignments. Van’s team was supposed to stand down for some R&R today, but with everyone else out of the camp on duty, that left her team, Alpha 9’er to stand watch.
In hundred and twenty degree weather did it really matter if you were in your bunk or up on the watchtower? You sweated the same. Her shirt was stuck to her back and Van feared that it might never come off. Or if it did, how much skin it was going to take with it.
Her phone buzzed at her hip, an incoming text message. It must have been from her mom. “Bad night,” was all it said, yet it said so much. Van’s dad had been diagnosed a little over three months ago with Alzheimer’s yet his mind has descended so quickly. Van thought the disease was supposed to be the long slow goodbye, but the family had barely been able to digest the news before the patriarch of the family couldn’t recognize any of them.
Van still felt guilty that she hadn’t taken some compassionate leave and gone home. Heck, neither had any of her five brothers. They had all offered but their mother, the ultimate army wife had scoffed. Each of her children were stationed overseas doing important jobs and she’d threatened them with a tongue lashing if any one of them arrived on her doorstep. Of course Van didn’t think their mother had counted on her husband to go downhill so quickly.
And if her mother was complaining? It must be worse than bad. It must have been a horrible night. Van ached to go home, not to get out of the Afghani heat, but to be there for her mother, even if she couldn’t be there for her father any longer.
“Captain!” a man shouted from down below. It sounded like Jester’s voice that drew her attention away from the text. “Ahead!”
Van swung her binoculars up and searched the horizon. Sure enough there was a dust cloud heralding the arrival of a vehicle. Van frowned. None of the recon or combat units were supposed to be back before the cover of dark.
Whoever was speeding their way, was not an American unit. Slowly the vehicles came into view. The front truck was hauling ass, zigzagging across the valley floor launching itself nearly airborne at it hit potholes and rocks. The second car was tight on the lead truck’s ass, shooting as they went. No wonder the front truck was driving so erratically.
The most astonishing thing about the scene was that the second car, the car shooting at the truck had the distinct blue flag of the UN. Um, wasn’t the point of the UN to not shoot at people? Especially since that was not a peacekeeper vehicle but instead a diplomatic sedan.
Van wouldn’t have been surprised if the pair had been a villager being chased by a drug lord. Being stationed on the Durand Line, the southeast porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, her unit had to get in the middle of more than a few local beefs over the past few months, but this, this was different.
“High alert!” Van shouted as her men assembled in a defensive formation around the gate, however if that three quarter ton truck decided to go through the gate, hell, the fence, it was going to. She couldn’t let that happen.
No matter the circumstance, you learned to always assume the danger approaching was a suicide bomb.
“Rifle,” Van said and put her hand out.
Lori, nicknamed BQ for Beauty Queen, their resident shooter curled her button nose up. “You sure you don’t want me to take the shot?”
Van glanced over. Lori, who still signed her name with a heart above the “I” looked like she’d just stepped off an Iowa cornfield. She had honey blond hair, pulled back into two French braids and freckles that covered her nose and cheeks. To think the All American girl was a trained sniper was slightly disconcerting.
“No, I’ve got it.” If this was going to be a cold-blooded shooting, of possibly a teenager turned suicide bomber, Van was going to do it. She knew that BQ was a professionally trained sniper but that didn’t mean Van couldn’t spare the girl another kill.
Lori shrugged off her rifle and handed it to Van.
The metal barrel felt hot against her skin. Only the smooth wooden stalk felt cool. She raised the sight up to her eye and studied the oncoming drama. The second car was still taking potshots as the truck hurled its way toward the camp.
The driver came into view. Or at least as much as Van could make out. The man had on a turban and pulled the material over his face. From the lines at the corner of his eyes Van guessed the guy was in his mid to late thirties. There was a passenger next to him, equally anonymously dressed. The passenger had an AK-47 sticking up out of his lap. Why wasn’t he firing back? And didn’t they have any men in the back of the truck? From what Van could see, the truck was driving low, looking like it was carrying quite a bit of weight. A suicide bomb?
“Should we fire?” Jester asked from below. He was down on one knee, braced for firing.
“I’ve got it,” Van said, taking a deep breath and holding it. When the truck showed no signs of slowing down, she fired once, watching the bullet smash through the glass, nailing the driver right in the center of his forehead. The truck swerved as the passenger grabbed the wheel and tried to keep the truck on a crash course with the camp’s gate.
Van fired again, striking the passenger in the back. He slumped over the driver. Now with no guidance, the truck kept accelerating. The driver’s foot must have gotten wedged on the gas pedal. As men leapt out of the way, the truck crashed through the gates.
Bracing for the blast that was sure to come, Van squinted, not exactly wanting to see her own death. But the blast never came. The impact with the gate must have dislodged the driver’s foot as the truck rumbled to a halt, the engine whining its complaint.
Everyone kept back though. Just because the truck didn’t blow on impact didn’t mean that it wasn’t a suicide bomb. It wasn’t uncommon for either the bomb to not detonate or the bomber to chicken out at the last minute, however the bomber’s handlers had learned to deal with both problems.
They rigged the doors to blow when the first responders went to open up the truck. Van’s team had to assume that the truck was booby-trapped.
The driver of the second car jumped out of his vehicle, running toward the stalled truck. Van’s men stopped him however, this guy could be as much a threat as the truck was.
He pulled out a leather wallet from his jacket and flipped it open to reveal a badge of some sort. Again, it was U
N blue.
“I’m a bloody nuclear inspector!” the man blared in a thick Scottish accent. “Let me through!”
Her men were clearly unnerved by the nuclear part, but they held their ground.
“Let him through,” Van ordered. If that badge and accent were fake, this would have to be the most elaborate hoax to get inside an Army encampment ever. It all seemed far too sophisticated than the thuggish Taliban tactics to date.
From her vantage point on high, she watched the inspector rush across the compound and flip up the cover on the back of the truck.
“Oh my god,” the man mumbled as he backed away.
What the hell was in there to make him blanch like that?
Van took a few steps to the left to find that the truck was packed with bricks. Ordinary mud bricks. This whole ordeal hadn’t been about bricks.
She handed off the rifle to BQ. “Cover me.”
She didn’t even bother to double check that Lori was, she knew that the girl would do her job.
Hustling down the steps, Van made her way across the gravel yard to the inspector.
“Care to share what’s going on?” she asked.
The man didn’t answer, instead he hit an object in his ear. “It isn’t here,” he said. “We followed the wrong bloody truck.”
“If you explained things, maybe I could --”
The man cocked his head, clearly listening to a different conversation than Van. “Do you have a location?” Van waited as the man tilted his head as if it could help him hear better. “Roger that.”
Finally he turned to her. “Do you have a chopper?”
Van’s eyes narrowed. “A helo? No,” she said. “But base camp twenty clicks from here does.”
“How quickly could it get here?” the man asked, again so thickly accented Van could only catch every other word.
“About a half an hour, however neither you nor I have the authority to get it into the air, let alone to task it with a combat mission.”
Apex Predator Thriller Series Collection (Including the blockbuster new shark park thriller, Salechii) Page 64