In The Ruins
Hailey Turner
IN THE RUINS
Copyright © 2017 by Hailey Turner
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design by Kasmit Covers.
Professional Beta Reading by Leslie Copeland: [email protected]
Edited by Jersey Devil Editing.
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Contents
BEFORE
Prologue
AFTER
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
NOW
Chapter 16
INDEX
Author’s Notes
Connect With Hailey
Other Works By Hailey Turner
BEFORE
2281
___________________
Prologue
Rage Against the Dying
“Make them stop!”
The words came out broken, in a voice worn raw from endless screaming. He almost didn’t hear his sergeant’s plea through the throbbing in his head and the grinding agony ripping through his own body. But he could see her face where she lay within reach—lips peeled back in a painful snarl, tongue bitten through, blood a crimson scatter over her teeth, the shape of the words she mouthed in a forgotten prayer.
He slid his hand through the dry, dry dirt of a city long since abandoned by people and reclaimed by the earth with the help of scorching desert wind and an implacable heat. He didn’t know how long it had been since they lost the battle, but the sky overhead was no longer black, while the horizon burned with false dawn.
He found his sergeant’s outstretched hand with shaking fingers and gripped it with a strength he shouldn’t have.
When she screamed, he heard it in his mind, the sound like waves crashing against the shore in the far distance, breaking against the bones of his body.
Make the voices stop!
He heard nothing but the wind and her gasping sobs and the quiet click in his ear he only vaguely grasped the meaning of. The world spun around them, but he didn’t close his eyes. It took everything he had to remember how to communicate beyond wordless, agonized screams. When he finally spoke, he didn’t recognize his own voice.
“Requesting medevac.”
Her fingers—broken now, and he didn’t know how that had happened—moved weakly in his grip, grounding him. Her bloodshot eyes kept looking at him with less and less sanity in their blue depths, and he swore he would not lose his sergeant like this.
Not like this.
“We’re still alive.”
AFTER
2285
___________________
1
You Can Hear the Bullet
Staff Sergeant Kyle Brannigan stared through the scope of his Barrett M293A sniper rifle with one sharp green eye. His position in an empty office skyscraper located in the outskirts of the Los Angeles megacity’s business district was definitely more comfortable than some of the places he’d had to shoot from.
He’d carved out a small hole in the plas-glass that the muzzle of his rifle with its suppressor could easily fit through. The windows on the floor he’d chosen and the levels directly above and below had been darkened against the midday sun, helping to hide his activities from any prying eyes. The desk he leaned against was sturdy enough to hold his weight and the weight of his sniper rifle resting on its low tripod.
What passed for a mid-January winter storm had swept through the area last night, warm rain driving what smog the pollution filtration towers hadn’t sucked up yet all the way to the ground. It left the skies partly cloudy but the air clear, allowing for clear LOS, and Kyle would take that over the height of muggy, smoggy summer any day of the week. As far as missions went, this was one of the easier ones. Filling in for Delta Team on a last-minute basis wasn’t difficult. Wetwork in general was messy, but sometimes it was easy.
A street two kilometers away passed through the crosshairs and mil dots in his scope as Kyle scanned the area around a cluster of warehouses that was their target’s probable destination. He saw no movement aside from a few joggers. On a Sunday afternoon in the business district, there wasn’t much activity to begin with, which was probably why their target had chosen the location. It made Kyle’s job simpler in the sense that he wouldn’t have to factor in too many civilians getting in the way, though it’d been a bitch to find an angle that wouldn’t require him to shoot through Los Angeles’s notorious ground and aerial traffic.
“Are we sure the target is supposed to show?” Kyle asked over the encrypted comms Alpha Team used in the field. The nanotech embedded beneath the skin around his ears amplified everyone’s voices a little as they came through the line.
“Analysts are 90 percent certain the buy will occur today, Reaper,” Sergeant Ekaterina Ovechkina replied using Kyle’s code name. When off the clock, she went by Katie, but in the middle of an op, she was their second-in-command and went by Viper.
The Metahuman Defense Force’s headquarters was located across the country in the Washington, D.C. megacity, which was where Katie was coordinating today’s op. Alpha Team consisted of eight metahumans, all with various skill sets. It wasn’t unheard of for members of the team to break off into smaller squads. It reminded Kyle a lot of how his old Strike Force team had functioned, which had made the transition from being a Special Forces operative into a fully-fledged member of Alpha Team a lot easier, despite the initial mess that was his introduction.
“Not see likely suspects,” Staff Sergeant Alexei Dvorkin said, his Russian accent a hard scrape over the words as he peered through his high-powered binoculars at the city below them. “Only see tourists. Is not tourist area. Why they go there?”
“For the food, Inferno,” Madison Chan said cheerfully from outside the office. “All the taco trucks your heart desires.”
The team’s demolitions specialist was the only one in the field proper with them for this mission. Annabelle Brown, a former Night Stalker pilot, was on standby at Joint Forces Training Base within the Los Angeles megacity limits. She was their emergency exfil if things went spectacularly wrong.
Kyle lifted his head away from the scope, rubbing at his eyes. He’d been hunched over his rifle for the better part of the day, only taking one break to use the toilet out in the hall and eat an energy bar while Alexei took over for him. He and his adoptive older brother had been paired together as a scout sniper team for years with Strike Force, though Kyle was the better shot by far. Alexei was good, but he preferred being a spotter when they were in the field like this. Alexei’s main skill, aside from being a pyrokinetic, was as a close-quarters combat specialist. Luckily, that skill hadn’t been needed to get them inside today.
A sudden malfunction of the building’s environmental system Katie had oh so helpfully broken by hacking the server resulted in a frantic, intercepted call for repairs by the building’s management. The ruse enabled them to go in undercover as electricians so as to better hide their gear in bulky to
ol cases. Katie had control of the security system and would wipe every trace of them from the system’s hard drives and servers once they cleared out.
While Alexei supported Kyle in the elimination of the target, Madison’s job was to deal with the security guards that periodically made the rounds. They’d chosen her to do all the talking since she was originally from Los Angeles, and her voice wasn’t as distinctive as Kyle’s or Alexei’s. She knew the local slang better than they did and was less intimidating on first glance, though Kyle would never be one to underestimate her.
Kyle had grown up in Boston, the son of a violent Irish mob enforcer, before a retaliatory gang attack orphaned him at the age of thirteen. Alexei’s family had fled a refugee city the Ukraine on a generational refugee asylum request and had finally been relocated to Boston three years prior to that fateful night. They’d grown up as friends and the Dvorkins had taken Kyle in and adopted him. Everything about their ethnically Russian way of life had stuck with him long before he and Alexei joined the Army on a Special Forces contract.
“Should have taco truck here when we leave,” Alexei grumbled. “Buy on way out.”
“Y’all better bring me some grub if you do, or y’all are walkin’ home,” Annabelle said over the comms. “All twenty-five hundred plus miles.”
“Copy that, Icarus,” Madison said with a laugh as she came back into the office.
Kyle gave her a thumbs up before fitting his eye against the scope again, staring through its high magnification. He couldn’t get a read on wind speed since they weren’t outdoors, but Alexei was feeding him weather updates every few minutes from the sensor they’d placed outside on the window, and would give him a steady stream of information once the target showed up.
If the target showed up.
The Federación Cartel was one group of a loosely bound global alliance of criminal enterprises the MDF had discovered was attempting to create metahumans for their own use through torturous human experiments performed across multiple countries. The breakthrough came last summer, and since then, the MDF and their affiliates in other countries were playing catch-up when they couldn’t afford to if they wanted to keep the public safe.
The only thing that could turn a human into a metahuman was Splice, a toxic chemical created by terrorists for use in war over a hundred years ago. The nonpersistent, highly volatile chemical began as a liquid before vaporizing quickly. Whether absorbed through the skin or inhaled, the cytotoxicity of Splice was deadly to humans. It killed within hours through rapid catastrophic cellular collapse and had a 95 percent kill rate. The remaining 5 percent of survivors were inherently immune to Splice, their bodies jumpstarting long-dormant junk DNA and changing them into metahumans.
No one knew which junk DNA was the catalyst for the change, since each segment of junk DNA was different in every metahuman tested. Neither did scientists know what environmental factors, if any, needed to come into play. A viable vaccine had yet to be discovered, despite many companies trying to find a so-called cure over the years. Considering governments had a monopoly on metahumans, it wasn’t a surprise criminals and terrorists were attempting to make and field their own. War was big business and always would be.
“Got movement,” Alexei said suddenly. “Three SUVs, arrive southbound.”
Kyle adjusted the angle of his scope until he had the trio of vehicles in view once they cleared a building. “I see them.”
Kyle tuned everything else out except the steady drone of Alexei’s voice as he focused on the scene through his scope. The SUVs pulled through the security gate that surrounded the tall warehouses. He followed their route to the warehouse MDF analysts had tagged as the likely building the buy would go down in. The scope Kyle was using automatically took photos every minute and transmitted them back to base; he upped the interval to every five seconds by pressing a button on the side of the scope.
“Second group come westbound,” Alexei said.
“Copy that,” Kyle replied.
The SUVs rolled to a halt and people got out. Kyle focused on the man exiting the middle SUV from the rear passenger seat, pegging him as the one in charge based on his suit alone. Miguel Estrada was not part of the drug kingpin’s family who operated the Federación Cartel. His Estrada Organization was merely one arm of it, overseeing the transportation of weapons over the Southern California border and down the desert roads that stretched between San Diego and the Los Angeles megacity. His role as a ruthless weapons-trafficker had thrust him to a level of wealth and status that should have meant these sort of deals were left to an underling. Except he was here, which meant their intel was right, and whoever the buyer was, they had to be important.
“Target in sight,” Kyle said. “Do I have the green light?”
“Affirmative, Reaper. You have the green light,” Katie replied crisply.
The second group of SUVs pulled through the security gates and parked several meters away from the first group. Kyle kept eyes on Estrada, grimacing at how the man’s bodyguards kept blocking the shot as they moved with him to greet the new arrivals. Kyle shifted position a bare millimeter to get a better angle, never blinking. Shooting from a higher vantage point meant he could only see so much of a person’s face, and getting a decent photograph for facial recognition purposes was practically impossible.
He didn’t turn off the photo function of the scope, hoping to get enough that someone could render a composite of a face. Those few he could make out from the new group had the distinctive facial features of people hailing from Eastern Europe or Russia. Considering the first mission Kyle had ever run with Alpha Team resulted in them being teleported to a now-destroyed base in the Ukraine, formerly run by Russian operatives with a few French terrorists thrown in, that detail wasn’t surprising. Who they were escorting was difficult to make out through the screen of bodies, but he could tell it was a woman by her slighter build. He managed to get the curve of a cheek and jawline, half obscured by blond hair, before someone blocked his view.
The bodyguards around Estrada shifted a little, a bit of space opening up. Kyle stared through the scope and fell into that deep focus found only between one heartbeat and the next, the air slowing in his lungs as his finger rested against the trigger. It took three pounds of pressure to kill a man, and Kyle rarely missed.
Two kilometers away Miguel Estrada lifted his head, stared directly into Kyle’s eyes with a mocking smile, and mimed cutting his throat before pointing in his direction.
“What the—?” Kyle jerked backward. “Move!”
He threw himself away from his rifle and the desk even as Alexei sprinted away from the window without questioning his order. Madison dove through the doorway and out of his line of sight. Kyle put himself behind Alexei as they raced out of the office. He had just barely cleared the doorway when an explosion ripped through the space they’d just vacated. The leading edge of the concussive force of the bomb slammed into Kyle, sending him crashing against the opposite wall.
His head smacked hard against the wall, making his ears ring. Swearing through the pain, Kyle attempted to get his feet underneath him when something hard slammed against his back, bruising him even through the tactical armor he wore under the work suit. He couldn’t catch his breath as the floor suddenly gave way beneath him.
Smoke and fire rolled over him as Kyle frantically scrabbled for something solid to hold onto as he fell. Gravity tugged at his body before his left hand smacked into something solid and unmoving. Kyle clenched his hand around it tightly and curled his other arm over his helmetless head as everything below him gave way, crashing through the next few levels below and out into open air.
“Reaper!” Alexei bellowed through the black smoke blocking everything from view.
Kyle coughed hard to clear his lungs, swearing as he realized the pant legs of his work suit had caught fire. Dangling by one hand from a broken piece of what turned out to be rebar sticking out of a damaged floor, Kyle frantically slapped at the fire eating ho
les through his cover uniform.
“Reaper, I need your status, right now!” Katie snapped over the comms.
“Someone clear me for the goddamn skies over Los Angeles!” Annabelle snarled.
The fire rolled back away from the building in an unnatural way, taking with it the scorching heat blistering the exposed skin of his hands and face. Kyle lifted his head away from the dizzying distance between his dangling feet and the ground far below. He could heal from a lot of injuries, but he doubted he could heal from a fall of more than sixty levels high. Squinting through the smoke, Kyle struggled to make out where Alexei and Madison stood two levels above him.
“Got eyes on Reaper,” Madison said, sounding tense. “We need Icarus.”
“Negative,” Kyle coughed out, wincing at the rawness of his throat. The pain was rapidly fading, but not quick enough to make talking easy. “I’ll climb out. We don’t have time to wait for Icarus to get here, and she’ll only draw attention.”
The rebar holding him up felt sturdy enough in the section of the blown out building he’d fallen down to, but who knew how long it would hold. Ignoring the open air beneath him, Kyle eyed the closest bit of flooring. It didn’t look that solid, but even if it broke apart on impact, his momentum might be enough to get him clear before it fell. Flexing his fingers, Kyle started to swing his body.
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In the Ruins (Metahuman Files Book 2) Page 1