by Jon S. Lewis
:: CHAPTER 26 ::
The gateway wasn’t as random as they had thought. The soft spot in the atmosphere might have become a portal given time, but it needed some coaxing if they wanted to use it to escape from the jellyfish monsters.
After the pilot relayed their coordinates, a team in Nevada programmed the gateway using experimental technology that was similar to a personal teleporting device, but on a much larger scale. The machine was in development to use for military troop transport, allowing instantaneous travel instead of relying on ships and airplanes. Up to that point, no human had been used in any of the trials, only robots and drones. If the calculations were off—even by a fraction—the gateway would close, trapping anyone and anything inside. But Lobo had given the order himself, and thankfully the gateway worked.
The mangled jet made it to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, where the pilot landed on a private airstrip far from the commercial terminals. No sooner had the door opened than Colt grabbed Danielle’s hand and headed down the narrow stairs and onto the tarmac, where a fleet of emergency vehicles waited.
“I’m never flying again,” Danielle said as the wind blew strands of hair into her face.
Though it was the middle of the afternoon, it was already getting dark. The sky was overcast, and tiny white flakes fell from thick clouds, though they melted as soon as they hit the ground. It was just enough to make everything wet and miserable. Colt zipped his jacket and stuffed his hands in his pockets as a paramedic rushed over with a blanket, offering to wrap it around his shoulders. “I’m okay,” he said, waving her off.
“Where’s Oz?” Danielle asked. “I thought he was right behind us.”
As Colt scanned the crowd, he noticed the CHAOS agents. There were at least a dozen, maybe more. Some wore suits with long trench coats and others had dark jackets with CHAOS written across the back in bold yellow letters. All were armed, and Colt felt trapped. If Lobo told them that Colt was a Russian spy or that he’d been recruited into a fringe terrorist cell, there was a good chance they would shoot first and ask questions later.
“There he is,” Danielle said, pointing to where Oz stood in front of a black Mercedes R350 Crossover. It seemed like an extravagant vehicle, considering organizations like the FBI typically drove Chevy Suburbans. Maybe, Colt thought, lavish spending was part of the reason that Senator Bishop and other members of the oversight committee wanted to oust Lobo as the director.
Oz was locked in a conversation with a tall alien who was extraordinarily thin. She had pointed ears and something that looked like a cross between a dorsal fin and a Mohawk running down the center of her head. Her skin was a shade that reminded Colt of sea foam, her eyes were enormous, and instead of lips and a nose she had some kind of beak that made her look like a bald parrot.
As Colt and Danielle made their way across the tarmac, Oz’s eyes kept darting about. He was standing close enough to the alien that he didn’t need to talk in much more than a whisper, so Colt wasn’t able to overhear any of their conversation. When Oz saw them approaching, he nodded and the alien turned around.
“What’s that all about?” Danielle asked.
“I’m not sure,” Colt said. Watching the exchange left him with a pit in his stomach, and that wasn’t a good sign.
There was a flurry of motion, and Colt turned to see Ms. Skoglund bustling through the crowd in a thick coat, with fluffy white earmuffs and a matching scarf, mittens, and boots. “Oh my, are you two okay?” she asked, her face flush with concern.
“Yeah, we’re fine,” Colt said, confused.
“When they told us what happened up there, I was sick with worry.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but what are you doing here?” Colt asked as Ms. Skoglund enveloped him in an enormous embrace.
“You’re looking at the newly appointed head of online security for the entire CHAOS Military Academy,” she said, her face beaming with pride.
“That’s amazing,” Danielle said.
“I know, right? It’s like we’re all one big flock migrating out here together. And I even get to teach a couple of classes. Can you believe it? Me, a teacher?” She turned and coughed, covering her mouth with her fluffy mitten. “Anyway, I’m also here as your official greeter and chauffeur, so what do you say we pile into the van and head over to the academy?”
“What about Oz?” Danielle asked.
Ms. Skoglund shrugged. “He wasn’t on my list.”
:: CHAPTER 27 ::
The CHAOS Academy was less than twenty miles away from the airport, but thanks to the D.C. traffic it was going to take an hour or more to get there. Ms. Skoglund used the time to catch them up on what she knew about Operation Nemesis, which admittedly wasn’t much. She had just flown in that morning, and she’d spent most of the day on the telephone trying to find the luggage that the airline had lost. Spying on Lobo would have to wait until the morning.
She didn’t seem concerned that Oz had been assigned to another driver. After all, there were something like two hundred students flying in throughout the day, and she had spent most of it shuttling back and forth between the airport and the academy.
“Who was Oz talking with?” Danielle asked.
“I think her name is Giru Ba, but don’t quote me on that,” Ms. Skoglund said. “I haven’t been officially introduced, but I was told she’s one of the instructors at the flight school.”
Colt shut his eyes, pretending to sleep as Danielle told Ms. Skoglund all about the flying jellyfish and how she was convinced they were all going to die. “But I just realized something,” she said as she sat up straight, her eyes wide. “When that thing latched on to the plane, it was trying to break through Colt’s window—like it knew who he was.”
Ms. Skoglund looked at Colt through the rearview mirror. “Is that true?”
“I doubt it,” he said, shrugging.
“Think about it,” Danielle said. “It’s like that viper wasp back in Arizona. It pretty much ignored us and went after you.”
“That’s crazy.”
“It makes perfect sense. Trident created a biochip that allowed them to turn average people into remote control assassins, right? So why wouldn’t it work on animals?”
Ms. Skoglund bit the inside of her cheek. “I think Danielle might be onto something.”
“Why would Lobo send those things after me if Oz was in the jet?” Colt asked. “Do you think he’d be willing to kill his own son just to get to me?”
“What are the odds of getting attacked by an alien?” Danielle asked.
“CHAOS has confirmed about four hundred attacks since January,” Ms. Skoglund said. “And there are something like seven billion people on the planet.”
“Give me a second,” Danielle said as she entered the numbers into an app on her phone. “There. That puts your odds at 1 in 17,500,000. But somehow you managed to get attacked twice in the same week. And that doesn’t strike you as peculiar?”
“Maybe,” Colt said as he leaned back against the headrest.
“But it doesn’t explain why Lobo would send those things after me if he knew that Oz was there.”
“Okay,” Ms. Skoglund said. “I want you to be casual about this, but tell me if you recognize the guy driving the Mercedes. He’s about three cars behind us, and he’s wearing a black turtleneck and round glasses.”
Colt turned around, pretending he was checking on the luggage. He could see the car that Ms. Skoglund was talking about. It was a black CL550 Coupe, but he didn’t recognize the driver. “Never seen him before.”
“Me either,” Danielle said.
“Nuts,” Ms. Skoglund said. “He looks so familiar.”
“You don’t think he’s tailing us, do you?” Danielle asked.
“Can you see his front license plate?”
Danielle nodded. “I think so. It looks like it’s from Virginia.”
“See if you can find out whose name the car is registered under. Can you do that?�
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“I’ll have it for you in less than a minute,” Danielle said as she plugged the number into her phone.
“That’s my girl,” Ms. Skoglund said as she put her blinker on and eased into the right lane. “Now let’s see if he takes the bait.” Sure enough, he followed her. “All right, once is a coincidence, but twice is a fact.” This time she put the left blinker on before she crossed the median back to the center lane.
Colt couldn’t have been more obvious as he turned around to watch out the back window. The snow was falling more heavily, limiting visibility, but he could still see the Mercedes as it cut into the center lane.
“He’s totally following us,” Ms. Skoglund said, sounding almost excited.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Danielle said. “The car is registered to Aldrich Koenig.”
“As in the shape-shifting, six-armed alien who used to run Trident Biotech?” Colt asked. “Isn’t he supposed to be locked up in an underground facility somewhere in the middle of the desert?”
“A little on the dramatic side, but yeah,” Danielle said.
“The guy driving that car doesn’t look anything like him.”
“As you said, he’s a shapeshifter. He can look like whoever he wants,” Danielle said. “Besides, just because the car is registered under his name, it doesn’t mean that he’s the one driving it. It could be his butler, or a friend, or anybody.”
“Or Krone,” Colt said.
“You have a camera on that phone, right?” Ms. Skoglund asked.
“Of course,” Danielle said.
“Give it to old blue eyes back there so he can take a picture of the guy, and then I think we’ll ditch him.”
Colt snapped the picture as the Mercedes tore into the far left lane, cutting off a tow truck. The driver of the truck slammed on the brakes, and the back end started to swerve. He spun the steering wheel, trying to regain control, but the highway was slick from the snow. The truck flipped over, rolling at least seven times before Colt lost track. Tires screeched and horns blared as everyone tried to get out of the way.
“Hold tight,” Ms. Skoglund said. “Things are about to get interesting.” She started weaving in and out of traffic with the abandon of a New York City taxi driver. The van cut across two lanes, narrowly avoiding a collision with a school bus before she swerved back the other way.
“He’s right behind us,” Colt said as he watched the Mercedes through the rear window. It looked like the driver was reaching over to grab something out of the glove compartment. “Please don’t be a gun.”
“Get down!” Ms. Skoglund shouted.
The driver rolled down his window and fired three shots from a Walther P99 with tactical lights and a suppressor kit, each exploding from the barrel with a flash. The first missed, ricocheting off a road sign. The second hit the asphalt, but the third caught Ms. Skoglund’s mirror. The glass shattered and she screamed as she took her hands off the wheel. The van cut hard to the right, barreling across the traffic and onto the shoulder. She slammed on the brakes and the van teetered, going on two wheels before it touched back down. “All right,” she said, sounding out of breath. “Time to end this.”
“Wait . . . are you going to shoot him?” Danielle asked.
“As much as I’d like to, I’m going to have to improvise,” she said. “They won’t give me a gun.” She pressed the gas pedal to the floor and cut into the center lane. “Come on,” she said, watching the Mercedes through the rearview mirror. “You know you want me.”
It sped up until it was even with their van. The driver leveled the barrel of his Walther P99 at Ms. Skoglund, but she just smiled. “Got you!” She slammed the brakes and cranked the wheel to the left, clipping the back end of the Mercedes with her front bumper.
The sedan fishtailed and smashed into a pickup truck with oversized tires. The truck ran over the hood of the Mercedes before barreling across the median and into oncoming traffic. The Mercedes flipped over before skidding across the parkway, sparks flying as metal ground against asphalt.
Ms. Skoglund exited the George Washington Memorial Parkway and took back roads the rest of the way, hoping to avoid local law enforcement. Colt didn’t mind the diversion. The Virginia countryside was beautiful, filled with rolling hills and thick trees, though most had lost their fall colors.
“This is it.” Ms. Skoglund pulled the van onto a nondescript road that cut through what looked like a forest. “If either of you wants to make a run for it, now’s your chance. Because once we’re inside the gates, there’s no turning back. Your lives are going to become the property of the Central Headquarters Against the Occult and Supernatural for the next eighteen months. After that it only gets worse.”
Danielle looked at Colt through the rearview mirror. “Worse than sitting through another one of Mr. Pfeffer’s lectures in world history? I don’t think so.”
They laughed as they followed the winding road for about a mile before they came to an iron gate topped with spikes. Ms. Skoglund held up what she called an identicard—it looked a bit like the school ID they carried at Chandler High, only it was programmed with data like blood type, allergies, and level of security clearance.
The gate opened, and she drove up to a building that wasn’t anything like what Colt had expected. There was no grassy lawn, towering pillars, or ivy creeping up the front of the façade. There wasn’t even a flagpole. Nothing about this place screamed private school for the elite, but maybe that whole brick mansion thing was just in the movies.
“This is the CHAOS Academy?” Danielle asked, clearly as shocked as he was. She still hadn’t unbuckled her seat belt, as though by doing so she would be committing to something that she wasn’t quite ready for. “It’s kind of . . . I don’t know. I guess it’s not what I expected.”
“Yeah, it has that whole psychiatric hospital vibe, but don’t worry. They keep all the crazies locked up in the basement.”
Danielle looked at her, eyes wide and jaw hanging slightly open.
“It was a joke,” Ms. Skoglund said, patting her on the back of the hand. “Trust me, this place may not have much in the way of curb appeal, but inside it’s amazing—especially for a tech head like you.”
“Okay,” Danielle said, her voice weak.
Colt wasn’t used to seeing her like this. Growing up, she hadn’t been afraid of anything. He remembered the time when they were seven and her mom saw a scorpion on their kitchen tile. Colt was ready to climb up on the countertop, but Danielle trapped it beneath a glass bowl until the pest control team showed up.
“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” Ms. Skoglund said. “I’ll see you at orientation tonight and try to sneak you into the computer lab for a private tour.”
Danielle tried to force a smile as her hand found the release for her seat belt.
“You better get going,” Ms. Skoglund said. “I’m supposed to pick up some of the other recruits in a half hour, and I still need to figure out how I’m going to explain what happened to the van.”
Colt slid his door open and stepped onto the sidewalk as a cold breeze burst across the school grounds. He waited as Danielle sat there an extra moment longer, then she joined him. “What about our luggage?”
“You’ll get it soon enough.” Ms. Skoglund reached over, stretching her short arm as far as it could reach to shut Danielle’s door. The lock clicked and she drove off, leaving them standing alone in the cold.
:: CHAPTER 28 ::
There was a set of double doors at the top of the stairs, but the glass was tinted so they couldn’t see inside. Colt looked for a doorbell or some kind of buzzer, but he couldn’t find anything.
“Just knock,” Danielle said, but before he could raise his hand there was a buzzing sound and one of the doors clicked open.
They walked into a foyer that was at least the size of the gymnasium back at Chandler High. The floor was covered in marble tiles, and the glass panes along the ceiling were streaked with condensation from the snow.
There was no art on the walls or even an exit sign over the doors. In fact, there was no decor at all. It was sterile. Lifeless. Intimidating.
On the opposite end of the room was a reception area where a soldier stood in full combat uniform. He wore a ballistic vest and had a M4 Carbine that hung from a strap slung over his shoulder. The tag embroidered on his chest read Hayden.
“Um, hi,” Colt said. “We were wondering if this is where we’re supposed to go . . . you know, for the CHAOS Academy?”
“Names, please.” Hayden’s voice was rich and dark like his skin.
“I’m Colt McAlister, and this is—”
“I know my own name,” Danielle whispered. She threw her shoulders back and stared the man straight in the eye. “I’m Danielle Selena Salazar. Do you need to see my invitation?”
“That won’t be necessary,” he said. “Stand by for full body scan.”
“Excuse me?” Danielle asked.
“Initiate sequence 3-5-Alpha.”
Two metal spheres rose from behind the counter, each about the size of a bowling ball. Somehow they flew across the room until one hovered over Colt’s head and the other was directly above Danielle. Apertures opened, bathing them in green light. A moment later they were looking at holographic replicas of themselves. They were green and slightly translucent, like an x-ray. And they were spot on.
“What’s that hanging around your neck?” Hayden asked.
“It’s just something my grandpa gave me,” Colt said, fingering the tarnished surface. “He wore it when he fought in World War II.”
“So it’s true?” Hayden asked, his face stern and his voice measured. “Murdoch McAlister is your grandfather?”
“Yes, sir,” Colt said.
Hayden smiled. “You’ve been the only thing people around here have been talking about for weeks.”
Colt wasn’t sure how to respond.