Resistance (Nomad Book 3)
Page 29
“There must be a way.”
Ufuk shook his heads, tears streaking his soot-stained face. “Müller’s gone. No way we can catch him. He’s won. And his men will be back. Soon. They’ll bomb this place. He has everything.”
Even through Jess’s adrenaline and the confusion, she sensed the tears Ufuk cried weren’t for Hector, and by “everything” he didn’t mean the boy. She felt like smashing him in the face, dragging him into the hallway and beating the man to a pulp—but she still needed him.
Peter yelled instructions to Giovanni, who dug through the medical drawers. Peter had placed a device over Massarra’s side, and an image of her internal organs displayed on the wall next to the digital doctor. The thump-thump of Massarra’s heartbeat filled the room as they connected into her vitals that appeared on the other wall.
“Then we have to get out of here,” Jess said to Ufuk, her voice calm. “How long do we have till they come back?”
“An hour?” Ufuk shrugged. “Maybe two, based on their incoming flight trajectories.”
She wasn’t going to be any use to Hector if she was dead, and the way Müller had looked at her when she volunteered to join him? He wanted her; he still needed something from her. There was value there, something she could negotiate.
“Not everything,” coughed a weak voice.
It was Massarra. She tried to reach over the metal gurney-table with one blood-soaked hand to grab Ufuk’s hair. “He doesn’t have it,” she gurgled.
Ufuk blinked once and then twice, then twisted around onto his knees, his face next to Massarra. “What do you mean?”
The Israeli lifted her head an inch and tried to smile. She could only open one eye a slit; the other was swollen to the size of a grapefruit. Three of her front teeth had been knocked out, the others streaked in blood. “Cryogenic room three, freezer two,” she coughed. Her eye rolled back, her head slumped.
A high-pitched flat whine filled the air.
“We’re losing her!” Peter yelled. He shoved Ufuk out of the way and scrambled for the defibrillation unit on the wall.
Ufuk was on his knees, his hands stained with Massarra’s blood. He glanced at the Israeli on the table as Peter cleared her shirt, yelling instructions at Giovanni. Ufuk jumped to his feet and grabbed Jess by her collar, tried to pull her into the hallway.
“What are you doing?” Jess screamed at him, her eyes on Massarra’s inert body.
“You want Hector?” Ufuk yelled back. “Then get that M4 and follow me.” He stumbled out of the infirmary entrance without looking back.
Jess watched him go, glanced at Massarra. “Damn it,” she cursed and grabbed the M4 from the floor and did her best to sprint after Ufuk.
Through one corridor and then the next, she hobbled on her prosthetic. Ufuk wasn’t much faster. The guards had done a good job beating him. Sirens and alarms wailed as they passed from one area to the next, doors automatically opening before them and closing behind. They passed under a wide sign announcing: “Launch Installation.”
“Where are we going?” Jess yelled.
They entered a cavernous room. The walls were charred in places, evidence of grenades. Explosions. In the middle of the cavern was the top-half of a missile. A rocket. The bottom half of it, just visible through grating, looked blasted by an explosion. Shards of metal. Two slumped bodies in coal-black uniforms on the floor, a third draped halfway in a doorway.
Must have been the location of Massarra’s last stand.
“This way,” Ufuk urged. He stood in a doorway marked, “Cryogenics Facility.”
Jess followed him as quickly as she could, her patience rapidly draining. They had to get back to Raffa and Massarra.
Ufuk disappeared into a room just ahead of her.
She stumbled forward and opened the door, hung herself half inside. “What is wrong with you? We need to get back.”
Ufuk stood in front of her with a dumb smile on his face. He’d put on two enormous yellow gloves that stretched up to his armpits. “Shall we find out?”
“I’m going to shoot you right now.”
“Could you wait just one second before doing that?”
He held up one gloved hand to her, and with the other opened a huge stainless steel door marked “Freezer Two” in black-stenciled letters. He knelt behind the door, and then reappeared holding what looked like a massive metal roasting pan. Thick wisps of smoke oozed over the surface and spilled toward the floor.
“Liquid nitrogen,” Ufuk explained as he placed the metal pan on to the table next to the freezer. The door swung shut by itself.
Jess entered the room fully, her M4 now slack by her side. “This better be good.”
“It better be,” Ufuk agreed. He dipped his right, gloved hand into the oozing steam. His face lit up as he found something. What looked like a white plastic container two feet long emerged from the evaporating liquid nitrogen before he lowered it back.
“Is that what was in your fancy metal container?” Jess asked. “From the airplane?”
Ufuk nodded emphatically. “What a clever, clever girl that Massarra is.”
“Was.”
“We don’t know that. We should go back.” He started to pick up the metal pan.
“Wait, what is this goddamn thing she died for?”
“It is the future of the human race.”
Jess used the muzzle of her M4, clanked it against the metal pan to stop him from picking it up. “And what the hell does that mean?”
Ufuk relented and took a step back. “Actually, what I said is not quite correct. That is not the future of the human race…”
He took off one glove and pointed a naked finger at the boiling liquid nitrogen, a mad grin spreading across his face, and said: “That is the human race.”
Thanks for reading!
To find out what happens next, read DESTINY, the final book in the NOMAD series, out on March 15th, 2017, but available for pre-order now. Just search for DESTINY on Amazon.
AND PLEASE…
I’d really appreciate a review. The number of reviews a book accumulates on a daily basis has a direct impact on how it sells, so just leaving a review, no matter how short, helps make it possible for me to continue to do what I do.
OTHER BOOKS BY MATTHEW MATHER
All of my books are a part of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program.
CyberStorm
Award-winning CyberStorm depicts, in realistic and sometimes terrifying detail, what a full scale cyberattack against present-day New York City might look like from the perspective of one family trying to survive it. Click here or search for CyberStorm on Amazon.
Darknet
A prophetic and frighteningly realistic novel set in present-day New York, Darknet is the story of one man’s odyssey to overcome a global menace pushing the world toward oblivion, and his incredible gamble to risk everything to save his family. Click here or search for Darknet on Amazon.
Atopia Chronicles (Series)
In the near future, to escape the crush and clutter of a packed and polluted Earth, the world’s elite flock to Atopia, an enormous corporate-owned artificial island in the Pacific Ocean. It is there that Dr. Patricia Killiam rushes to perfect the ultimate in virtual reality: a program to save the ravaged Earth from mankind’s insatiable appetite for natural resources. Click here or search for Atopia on Amazon.
BOOKS BY LUCAS BALE
Beyond The Wall
The Heretic (Book One)
Defiance (Book Two)
A Shroud of Night and Tears (Book Three)
Atonement (Novella)
Anthologies and Short Stories
No Way Home (Stories From Which There is No Escape)
Tales of Tinfoil (Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy)
The Time Travel Chronicles
What It Means To Survive
Chukotka
Shades (published in the Time Travel Chronicles)
Copyright Notice
RESISTANCE
> MATTHEW MATHER ULC.
Tomorrow’s books today.
Copyright © 2016
Matthew Mather ULC
ISBN: 978-1-987942-07-1
Cover image by Momir
Co-written with Lucas Bale
This is a work of fiction, apart from the parts that aren’t.
Author Bios
Matthew Mather
In just five years, Matthew Mather's books have sold over a million copies, been translated into eighteen languages, and optioned for multiple movie and television contracts. He began his career as a researcher at the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines before starting several high-tech ventures, everything from computational nanotechnology to weather prediction systems, to even designing an award-winning brain-training video game. He now works as a full-time author of speculative fiction.
You can contact him through his website: www.matthewmather.com
Lucas Bale
Lucas Bale writes intense, thought-provoking science-fiction thrillers that dig into what makes us human and scrape at the darkness which hides inside every one of us.
His debut novel, The Heretic, is the gateway to the award-winning Beyond the Wall series, an epic space opera with an edge of hard science fiction about the future of humanity and the discovery of the truth of its past. Find the first three books in the series here: https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Wall-3-Book/dp/B00ZRMDG8E/
He wasn't always a writer. He was a criminal lawyer for fifteen years before he discovered crime doesn't pay and turned to something that actually pays even less. No one ever said he was smart, but at least he's happy.
If you'd like to hear about new releases before everyone else, get advance review copies of those new releases and every short story he ever writes for free then subscribe to INSIDE, his semi-regular newsletter, here: www.lucasbale.com/inside
If twitter is your thing, you'll find him at @balespen
Table of Contents
Prologue
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
PART TWO
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
PART THREE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
PART FOUR
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8