The Secret Apocalypse: Box Set 2
Page 59
We pass a train. It is abandoned and completely empty.
We walk in darkness for the better part of a day.
We follow Sarah all the way to the Western Vehicle Access Point.
And I start to relax. We’ve made it. We’re getting out.
The hatch to the outside world is wide open. Sunlight pours in, illuminating the massive hangar, momentarily blinding us. When my eyes adjust, I stare at the blue sky. I am hypnotized by the sunshine. It is brighter than I remember. Brighter than I could ever imagine.
I feel its warmth and goose bumps form on my skin.
We are so close. I smell the fresh air, the dry desert air.
But then Daniel tells us to stop. He pushes me and Maria against the wall of the tunnel.
“What the hell?” I ask.
“Everyone down,” he whispers. “Quiet.”
“What is it?” Kenji asks.
“They’re here,” Daniel answers.
“So?” Kenji says. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s only two of them. I don’t see a rescue chopper. I don’t hear a rescue chopper.”
Daniel is looking dead ahead, into the Vehicle Access Point. But I can’t see a thing. There’s no one there.
“Do you see them?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he whispers. “Yeah, I see them. They’ve got their cloaking devices activated. I’m going in. Wait here. Stay back until I give the all clear. Stay hidden.”
He tells us to stay hidden. He says this quietly.
And once again I get the feeling that something is wrong.
No Escape but Death
Daniel moves out into the open. He enters the Vehicle Access Point, leaving the subway tunnel, crossing the threshold of the massive circular blast door.
A split second later, the Evo Agents deactivate their cloaking devices and come shimmering into view. There is only two of them. They are dressed in full NBC suits. And again, I can’t help but feel that they do not look like a rescue squad.
They look like heartless, soulless, killer robots.
We still can’t hear a rescue chopper.
Daniel raises his hands to let them know he is not a threat. “My name is Daniel Hudson, I’m with…”
One of the Evo Agents makes a hand signal, making a fist, and Daniel immediately stops speaking. He stops moving. His hands are still raised.
“Where is Doctor Hunter?” the Evo Agent asks. “Where is Doctor Kumar Singh?”
“What are you talking about?” Daniel says. “They were extracted days ago. They were collected by…”
“No. The recon team never returned. They never made it back to base.”
“Never returned?” Daniel asks. “What are you saying?”
“Our primary objectives are still at large.”
Never returned.
They never made it back. And now the man in the gas mask is on the run again. He is on the loose.
Something is wrong. Something is messed up.
“Where are the rest of your men?” the Evo Agent asks.
Your men.
Daniel shakes his head. “I’m the only survivor.”
The hatch to the outside world is wide open. Why is it open? What about the nuclear fallout?
I remember what the man in the gas mask said to me.
Australia is not a nuclear wasteland. The warheads were detonated in the upper-atmosphere. There will be minimal to zero nuclear fallout.
I’m starting to realize the man in the gas mask, that lying son of a bitch, that murdering psychopath, was telling the truth.
The Evo Agents suddenly point their guns at Daniel.
“What are you doing?” Daniel asks.
“Where is your team?”
“I told you. I’m the only survivor.”
“Where is Kenji Yoshida? Kim Richards? Maria Marsh?”
Daniel hesitates. I don’t know why he hesitates.
And then he lies.
He lies and he says, “They didn’t make it. No one made it. I’m the only survivor.”
Something is wrong.
And these guys are no rescue squad.
Why did Daniel lie?
Trust no one.
“On your knees,” the Evo Agent says to Daniel. “Hands on your head.”
Daniel obeys. He drops to his knees.
“What are they doing?” I whisper to no one, to myself. “What the hell is going on?”
One of the Evo Agents ties Daniel’s hands behind his back. The other Evo Agent draws his sidearm. I can’t see clearly from my vantage point, but the sidearm appears to have a silencer attached to the barrel.
The Evo Agent aims for Daniel’s head.
“No,” I whisper. “This can’t be happening. This can’t be…”
Kenji grabs me, covers my mouth.
And everything happens so fast.
We are powerless to stop it.
And these guys are no rescue team
They are assassins.
The Evo Agent, the heartless, soulless, killer robot, pulls the trigger.
The gunshot is a whisper.
It is silenced.
There is no bang.
No boom.
It makes a weird noise. I can’t describe it.
Daniel slumps over. Motionless
Devoid of all life.
Kenji holds me tight. He is still covering my mouth with his hand, so I scream into it.
I struggle. I try and wrestle free.
I bite his hand.
I bite hard. Like an infected person. But Kenji does not flinch.
He holds on.
The Evo Agents unravel a large black bag.
A body bag.
They bag Daniel’s lifeless corpse and they zip him up. They don’t want to risk contamination.
“Target is secure,” the Evo Agent says to I’m not sure who.
And then in a matter of seconds a chopper appears over the Access Point.
But this is not a rescue chopper. And it is not for us.
It is not for us, because we are expendable.
No one is coming for you.
Two ropes are dropped down, and then a stretcher is lowered. The Evo Agents secure Daniel’s body to the stretcher. And then he is hoisted up and out of the Fortress. And just like that, Daniel is gone. He has become a specimen.
They will study him. His body. His blood.
They will harvest his organs.
The company will do this.
YoshidaCorp.
For research.
For profit.
The Evo Agents clip themselves to a rope each. They are pulled up and out of the Fortress by the waiting chopper. The sound of the rotor blades, of the helicopter, fades into the distance.
And once again, we are alone.
Kenji finally releases me, and I fall forward. I fall to my knees. And I can’t believe it. I am in shock. Daniel is dead. Executed by his own people. Executed by the company.
No one says a word. No one knows what to do.
The blast doors of the Vehicle Access Point slowly close. Sunlight fades away. And I feel like we are going to be trapped down here forever.
You are lucky. But sooner or later your luck will run out. Sooner or later you will lose someone close to you. You will lose your family.
Daniel tried to warn me. He tried to tell me that eventually I will lose my family. Because it had happened to him. He told me this, he tried to prepare me for this loss, for this heart wrenching, heart breaking, hope-killing loss.
But I am not prepared.
How could anyone ever prepare themselves for something like this?
I become lost in my own thoughts, in my own world.
Everyone is silent. And this silence is a prayer. A mark of respect for a great soldier. A great guy who risked his life for our lives, time and time again.
“This way,” Sarah says, her voice sounding distant, like she is miles away. Worlds away. “The controls for the vehicle platform might still
be working.”
She begins walking. I’m not sure if anyone follows her. Kenji puts his arm around me. He pulls me forward.
I close my eyes. I see Daniel. I see him as the first time we met. Back in Los Angeles. He is smiling. He shakes my hand. I thought he would be a jerk. But he wasn’t. He was a good guy. A great guy.
I open my eyes. I am in the desert. We are in the desert. And the sun is blindingly bright.
Sarah had held up her end of the bargain. She had led us to the Vehicle Access Point. And then she had got us out.
She had got us above ground.
And even though she betrayed us, and double crossed us, even though I almost suffocated, I want to tell her that I’m sorry. Sorry for lying to you. Sorry for maybe breaking your wrist.
Sorry there is no rescue.
Sorry this is not over.
Because the best we can do right now is escape from the Fortress, from hell. The best we can do is escape back into the desert, back into the apocalypse.
The best we can do is search for a town.
A safe haven.
A home.
A future.
Because there is no fixing this…
There is no escape.
No escape from death.
No escape but death.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Land of Dust and Bones – Book 7 in the series is next!
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OUT NOW
THE SECRET APOCALYPSE SERIES
Have you read them all?
Land of Dust and Bones
Book 7 in The Secret Apocalypse series
Rage Against the Dying
Book 8 in the Secret Apocalypse series
The Lost Journal
(A Secret Apocalypse Story)
The Lost Journal Part 2
Villains of the Apocalypse
Coming Soon
WRATH AND RUIN
The Final Secret Apocalypse book!
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Land of Dust and Bones
The following is an excerpt from Land of Dust and Bones…
The Desert
We are walking through a desert, a dead land. We have been walking for…
I’m not sure how long.
Hours.
And I feel totally hopeless. Daniel has just been executed. Executed, killed, murdered by his own people. The Company. YoshidaCorp. And right now I want to give up. I want to lie down in the red dust of the Australian outback.
And close my eyes.
And never open them again.
What’s the point? We’ve come as far as we could possibly go. As far as anyone could ever have hoped to have survived.
This is an extinction level event.
Extinction.
We are not meant to survive this.
So there’s no shame in giving up at this point, right?
I know I’ve had these thoughts before. And each time I’ve had them, I’ve pushed them aside. Each time I feel like giving up, I simply don’t. I keep going, I keep moving forward. I keep putting one foot in front of the other. And I think maybe this is the secret to life, to living. All you have to do is put one foot in front of the other. All you have to do is keep moving forward.
If only it were that simple.
So right now, I feel like giving up.
And I fall to my knees.
But as soon as I do, Kenji grabs my shirt by the collar and picks me back up. He looks at me. He looks deep into my eyes and for a second his cold exterior melts away, for a second, his armor is stripped away. I see Kenji. The boy next door. The boy who saved me.
“I need you,” he says. “You can’t give up because I need you. And they need you.”
He whispers these words to me. And before I can say anything, before I can throw my arms around him, his armor is back and his cold exterior is back and he shuts out the world and everyone left in it.
I don’t know exactly what happened to Kenji when he was taken, when he was abducted and tortured by the man in the gas mask. I don’t think I’ll ever know. But if it’s anything like what that goddamn psychopath put me through, if it’s anything like what he put Maria through, then I know it was bad. I know it was worse than bad. I know Kenji has been to the brink, to the very edge of his sanity. I know he has been close to death.
Kenji turns to the group. He has that cold look in his eyes. He is determined. He wears his armor. It is invisible. It is not completely impenetrable, but it is strong. It is resilient. He tells everyone to gather around, to listen up.
Everyone slowly does what he says. Not because he is the boss and he is ordering us to do it, but rather because we all trust Kenji with our lives. And if I had to guess, I’d guess that no one had any idea what to do now, of what to do next. Or how.
I don’t even know if we’ll have the strength to get out of this desert.
So we all slowly gather around Kenji, waiting and hoping for a plan of action. Waiting for Kenji to say something that will miraculously make everything better.
Sarah has her hands on her head. And maybe the only thing I do know for certain is that she’s our best chance to get out of this desert. She might be our only ticket to safety.
There’s a small town. About three or four days away. They built walls. They built them early...
She keeps looking left and right. East and west. North, south. She is trying to get her bearings. She better get them quick because we need to get moving.
Kim is doubled over, hands on her knees. Her face is a bloodied and bruised mess. She took an absolute beating at the hands of the residential sector survivors of the Fortress. As a result, her face is swollen, her eyes are swollen, her lips are cracked and streaked with blood. I see her move her tongue around the inside of her mouth, pressing against the inside of her cheek. She then spits out a mouthful of blood.
The residential survivors tortured Kim first, they tortured her hard because they thought she was serving General Spears. They tortured her because they feared her, because they did not trust her.
I cannot blame them. I totally understand this.
Jack and Maria are huddled together, holding hands. They are looking at the horizon, staring at the horizon. The thousand yard stare is what Daniel called it. Jack is limping forward, he is struggling to stand on one leg. He was hit in his calf muscle with an arrow, a crossbow bolt. The work of the Death Squad. I have no idea how he is going to walk through the desert. Maybe we will have to carry him. Maybe we will have to drag him.
I stand next to Kenji, a little bit behind him. The sun is setting over our shoulders, slowly, lazily.
The others turn to us and raise their hands to shield their eyes from the sun.
&nbs
p; We must be silhouetted against the light. We are shadows.
Kenji takes a deep breath. “Guys, I know we’ve just been through hell. I know we all feel like shit, like giving up. It’s hard… losing someone. Someone who did so much for us. Someone who saved our lives time and time again. Daniel got us out of Sydney. And he tried his best to get us out of this country, tried his best to get us to safety. We probably wouldn’t have made it this far without him.”
And I’m wondering how do we keep going? How do we keep going without Daniel, a super soldier?
Why is he dead? And why are we alive?
How the hell are we going to make it without him?
Is our time running out?
We are not meant to survive this.
The sun continues to set.
“But we can’t give up,” Kenji says. “I won’t let any of you give up. We’re strong as a group. We’re all relying on each other to make it through this. We are each other’s source of strength. And trust me, we will need strength, because we are not out of danger yet.”
Yeah, I think to myself, we’re stuck in the middle of the desert.
In the middle of a zombie apocalypse.
Sarah said there was a town, a safe haven, but I’m struggling to believe it. How could there be any safe places left? What makes this town so special?
Every other town and suburb and settlement that we’ve come across has been overrun. Entire cities have fallen. The Fortress, a secret underground military base that was designed for the end of the world, for a situation just like this… has fallen.
“We know the company aren’t messing around,” Kenji says. “Their orders have been shoot to kill from day one of this thing. Same with the military. We know the infected are relentless. We know the nano-swarms can come out of nowhere. We know they are deadly. And we know the desert can kill quickly, easily. This is why we need to stick together. This is why we need to be strong.”