Mendez took in a few final gasps and managed a nod. “Think… I…cracked a rib.”
“Can you move your toes and fingers?” Dohi asked.
Mendez did both.
Rico bent down to help Mendez look for more serious injuries.
“You have no idea how glad I am to see you both alive,” Fitz said. “Are you hurt?”
“Just rattled,” Dohi said.
Ace handed Dohi a rifle. “Found this a few yards back.”
“Thanks.”
Rico and Ace helped Mendez to a sitting position.
“Martin is with the other Wolfhounds, waiting in the office building,” Fitz said. “Comms are still down, and with nothing other than our tactical radios, we can’t contact command anyway.”
“So what next?” Dohi asked, sticking a knuckle in his ear. Trying to equalize the pressure so he could hear better.
Fitz looked at the smoke and fires devouring the warehouses.
“When we were looking for you two, we grabbed a couple of computers and other things from the debris,” he said. “I want to make one more pass, just in case some of that SDS tech is still intact, but we don’t have a lot of time. Those hostiles could return.”
“Then we head back to the C-130?” Dohi asked.
“Correct,” Fitz said.
“Assuming it’s even there,” Rico said with a snort. “I got a bad feeling we’re on our own for the long haul.”
— 2 —
Timothy Temper ran from a muscular Rottweiler infected with VX-99. The snarling mutated beast chased him through a forest. It barked viciously as it gained ground. His lungs burned with every step, and his muscles felt heavier, slowing his gait.
He had no weapon to defend himself and nowhere to hide. There was only one option: keep running.
Skeletal branches reached down. He ducked underneath them, jumped over fallen logs, and burst through bushes that tore at his flesh.
A steep slope dropped away into a shallow valley on the other side of a tree line. He slid down the muddy embankment until his shoes hit the rocky ground.
Water snaked through the center of the valley, trickling over rocks. He crossed the creek, the cold water filling his shoes as he carefully navigated over the slick rocks.
At the other side, he stole a glance over his shoulder. The Rottweiler crested the hill he had just slid down, letting out a ferocious bark.
In the moonlight, the bulging muscles of a second Rottweiler emerged between a pair of oak trees on the other slope.
He was trapped.
The only way to escape was through the creek. But as soon as he turned to run, his foot snagged on something and he went down hard. His head slammed into a rock, and icy water splashed over his frozen body.
The first dog was on him in seconds. It sunk its teeth into one of his arms, ravaging his flesh.
He let out a howl of pain, twisting to break free. The bloodshot eyes of the dog drew closer. It let go of his arm and lunged toward his face.
Timothy woke to darkness.
Smoke filled his lungs.
This time, he wasn’t dreaming. Lucidity burned through the haze of pain and exhaustion. Another odor drifted in the air, a smell he recognized.
Burned flesh.
He tried to stand, but he was too weak. He fell back to the cold concrete floor.
“Hello…” he tried.
The words came out in a croak.
He reached up to his throat, probing tender flesh from a burn.
It was then he remembered.
The collar. It was gone.
Memories of his captivity crashed over him like a tidal wave. He recalled the bombs that had fallen over Outpost Portland in a last-ditch effort to destroy the Variants and collaborators.
“Hello…” Timothy said again.
Moaning came from the shadows, but it was all muffled. Then he heard what sounded like someone crying across the room.
The darkness obscured almost everything, but a few weakening flames cast ghastly shadows over hunks of fallen concrete. Moonlight streamed into another corner where a wall had collapsed.
The images transported his mind back to the chamber where the Variants had slung him up on a wall inside the hidden collaborator base. Pete, Nick, and Alfred had decided then to spare Timothy and induct him into their twisted army of the New Gods.
Most of the other people in that chamber had become Variant food or died when the roof partially collapsed.
As his eyes adjusted, Timothy saw people crushed under blocks of rubble. Beams had fallen over him, protecting him from the same fate.
He crawled out from under one, making his way into a space covered in jagged boards and broken bricks.
Navigating through the debris, he made it a few feet before hitting something wet and sticky. He felt around just to confirm it was a body.
The cold flesh told him the person was long-dead, which meant he had been unconscious for a while.
Putting his wrist over his nose, he continued toward the sound of sobbing and moans. The closer he got, the more bodies he hit, and the worse the stench of urine and feces became.
The center of the basement was a mass grave. Chunks of ceiling had rained down on the people that had hidden here for safety.
A beam of light suddenly burst from near the wall across the room. It shot across the rubble and raked over the dead.
Was it a collaborator?
Timothy ducked behind a body.
“Anyone alive?” came a voice.
“Help…” someone replied.
Timothy rose above the corpse. Two figures were standing behind the collapsed wall, peering into the basement.
“Over here,” someone else called out.
The light turned on the first person, and then came a burst of gunfire. A second burst peppered the debris in the other direction, silencing the sobbing.
Timothy went back down, flattening his body, heart hammering.
More gunfire pinged into the space, a few stray rounds punching into the body Timothy hid behind. Bullets hit the walls and corpses around him.
Finally they stopped, and the two flashlight beams probed the basement again.
In the glow, he saw another person on their stomach about five feet away. They put a finger to their mouth.
It was Sergeant Ruckley.
She held a pistol in one hand that she aimed at the men. Another Army Ranger lay prone next to her with a shotgun pressed against his shoulder.
There was no more sobbing or moaning. The two collaborators whispered to each other, and Timothy held his breath, waiting to see what they would do.
After what seemed like an eternity, the flashlight beams pointed away, leaving the basement bathed in darkness again. The sound of scuffling boots faded as the men retreated.
Ruckley crawled over and handed something up to him. Timothy felt the metal grip of a knife handle.
“We have to get out of here,” she whispered. “Follow us.”
As soon as she started to get up, she froze.
Timothy didn’t hear anything at first, but then came the snapping of joints. He lifted his head. Two new figures stood on the collapsed wall. This time, they weren’t men.
Moonlight glowed over the charred gray flesh of Variants. They scuttled down the scree of bricks and wood into the basement.
Timothy tightened his grip on the knife.
Ruckley backed up next to him. “Can you fight?”
“Yes,” Timothy replied.
“We need to kill them quietly so we don’t attract attention from the collaborators,” she said.
The other Ranger joined them. He was a young Asian man, probably not much older than Timothy.
“Neeland, you take the one on the right,” Ruckley said. “I’ll take the one on the left. Timothy, if we screw up, you help. Follow me.”
Timothy and Neeland crawled after the sergeant. The Variants were feasting on one of the people the collaborators had just shot. Snapping grist
le and the crack of a bone echoed in the room.
Ruckley was almost to her mark when Timothy hit a piece of loose debris. The concrete clunked on the floor, and the Variants spun. One jumped to a mountain of rubble on Ruckley’s left.
She slashed with her knife while the second Variant scampered toward Neeland.
Timothy tackled the beast. It opened a needle-toothed mouth that reeked of dead fish. He raised the blade and brought it down through the monster’s nasal cavity. It crunched through cartilage and bone before hitting the soft brain tissue.
The creature went limp, falling over Neeland.
Ruckley plunged her blade into another monster’s flesh over and over. Timothy helped her, jabbing his knife into the Variant’s side. The beast crumpled, but Timothy didn’t stop until the Variant let out its last breath.
Ruckley twisted toward him, panting, her uniform covered in blood. Timothy was drenched, too. He wiped his forehead off with a sleeve.
“You okay, Neeland?” Ruckley asked.
“I think so,” he said.
She put away her knife and pulled out her pistol. “Follow me.”
“Did you reach Command and tell them about the collaborator base at Mount Katahdin?” Timothy asked.
“Not yet.” Ruckley shook her head. “I didn’t have time before the attack. We need to find a radio.”
“Shit…” Timothy said. He wanted to scream, but he whispered instead. “They have a nuclear weapon and labs and…”
“I can’t do anything without a radio. We’ll find one and then get out of here.”
Timothy pictured Nick and Pete, too. “Not before we kill the collaborators.”
She looked at him with narrowed eyes. “What?”
“I have to find those collaborators,” Timothy said. “I’m not leaving this place until they’re all dead.”
***
Despite all the warnings from her military advisers and staff, President Jan Ringgold had moved central command back to the mainland. This was where she wanted to be, with her people suffering the onslaught of the Variants and their collaborator allies.
She knew it was risky, but that’s why she had ordered Vice President Lemke to stay on the USS George Johnson.
Her rise to the presidency had been utterly unexpected and sudden when the president and vice president had died along with most of their cabinet during the Great War of Extinction. Circumstance and fate had given her no choice but to rise to the occasion.
So when Lemke had told her he was going with her to Long Island, she had been blunt about him staying on the ship. If she died, they needed a clear line of succession to continue the fight.
Two guards escorted her down the hallway of the underground bunker where they had set up their temporary command. They took a right at an intersection and then stopped outside the blast door that led to the emergency operations center (EOC) and the living quarters. The guards stopped there.
This was the new White House.
Instead of hallowed halls filled with historical paintings and antique furniture, there were corridors ribbed with steel columns and girders rising from cracked concrete floors.
The bunker had served as a Cold War-era bomb shelter, its location stuffed away in government files to only recently be rediscovered. It was one of a handful of places she and General Souza had in their back pockets to serve as a safe house when things got grim.
Ringgold couldn’t think of a time when things looked grimmer since the first war.
She walked to her temporary quarters, stopping first in a bathroom that wasn’t much larger than a coffin. A showerhead on the ceiling sprayed directly onto a tiled floor with a drain in the center. Next to it was a toilet and a stainless-steel sink.
After splashing a little rust-colored water over her face, she took a deep breath.
This is it, Jan, she thought.
After she tied back her hair, she walked back to the EOC doors. The guards opened it, immediately letting out the chaotic noise.
Voices clamored across the open space as officers spoke with representatives from other outposts. People rushed back and forth carrying computers and satellite phones, radios and boxes of supplies. They needed to modernize this place in a matter of hours to continue their operations.
Ringgold could feel and see the tension in the raised voices and hurried movements. Everyone here knew how desperate the situation was.
She made her way through the sea of officers and staff gathering intel from the outposts across the Allied States.
Her briefings would come soon, but first she wanted to see the newcomers that had arrived an hour earlier.
She made her way into another narrow passage, the sound of dogs barking down the hall. The noise guided her to an open door in another claustrophobia-inducing room. Inside, Horn was telling the two German shepherds to sit, while his daughters stowed their meager belongings in a small closet.
Horn seemed to sense her presence and turned. “Madam President.”
The dogs wagged their tails as he held them back.
“Good to see you all have settled in,” she said. “Where are Kate and Reed?”
“Just down the hall,” Horn said.
Ringgold stepped into the room and bent down to pet the dogs. She glanced up at the girls. “Tasha, Jenny, how are you two?”
Jenny looked down. “Dad said we won’t be going back home.”
“Is Outpost Portland really destroyed?” Tasha asked.
Ringgold stood and looked to Horn who gave her a subtle nod.
“I’m afraid so,” Ringgold said. “I’m very sorry.”
Tasha’s bottom lip quivered, and she put a hand over her eyes as if to hold back the tears. She wiped them away as Jenny sat on a cot, nose sniffling, eyes watering. The dogs both looked at the girls, their tails going limp.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” Ringgold said. “We’ll rebuild, and we’ll make sure you get a new house.”
“But you can’t bring back Timothy or any of the others,” Tasha said.
“No, we can’t, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am for that,” Ringgold replied. “But Timothy and your friends would want you to keep moving forward with your lives.”
“Girls, let’s get unpacked and let the president get back to work,” Horn said.
The young women turned away looking devastated. It added to the guilt already consuming Ringgold.
When she returned to the hall, Beckham was standing there.
“Madam President,” he said.
Ringgold gave him a hug without saying a word.
“Are you okay?” he said quietly.
She pulled away and nodded. Seeing Captain Beckham always gave her strength. “Where’s Kate?”
“In the EOC conference room.”
“Let’s go then.”
She turned and they walked toward the conference room. Beckham opened the door when they got there.
At a round table in the center of the room sat General Souza, Lieutenant Festa, Dr. Lovato, and S.M. Fischer. They all stood to greet her.
These were her most trusted allies. People who had stood by her through the worst patches of the war. All were here because they believed in the Allied States—and because this was their only chance of survival.
Motioning for them to sit, she joined them at the table. The clamor in the hallways quieted with the closed door, and she steepled her fingers together on the table. Behind them was a wall of old CRT monitors that hadn’t yet been replaced. Souza and Festa each had a bulky laptop, but that was all her team of advisors had for communications for now.
“Let’s hear it,” she said, bracing herself for the bad news.
General Souza cleared his throat, then spoke. “All our warheads have been deployed, and we launched selective airstrikes at suspected Variant and collaborator targets.”
“How many outposts have we lost?” Ringgold asked, bracing herself for the answer.
“We’ve lost communication with seventeen,
” Souza replied coldly. He checked his notes on the table. “Another seven reported heavy casualties and persistent Variant activity as recently as fifteen minutes ago. That brings us to forty-one remaining outposts as of thirty minutes ago, but many are close to radiation zones.”
The cold fingers of fear curled inside Ringgold’s chest, squeezing her lungs as Festa listed off the cities hit by the nuclear warheads. “Philadelphia, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Kansas City, Dallas, New Orleans, Pittsburgh.”
Beckham’s jaw gritted at the report, but he said nothing. Fischer nervously pulled on his mustache. Kate stared ahead blankly.
“We hit them hard,” Souza said. “I’ve deployed a handful of recon teams in armored scout vehicles, but only time will tell if the brains of the operation are dead. I firmly believe destroying them is the only way to win this war.”
“Fighting on the ground out there, I can tell you from battle experience that things aren’t like they were eight years ago,” Beckham said. “There’s something more powerful controlling the masterminds.”
“It could be a well-connected human collaborator,” Fischer said. “Spies, military weaponry, newly developed weapons. It all smells like someone with firsthand knowledge of top-secret operations.”
“Have we heard anything from Team Ghost?” Beckham asked.
“Negative,” Festa said. “We lost contact.”
Beckham wrinkled his brow but retained his composure.
“So the SDS equipment is a loss?” Fischer asked.
“Don’t write them off yet,” Beckham said firmly.
Ringgold turned to Kate. “Right now, we need to fight this unconventional war with unconventional means, and Dr. Lovato, you might hold the keys to that. Can we move forward with the communication software your team developed to tap into the Variant network?”
All eyes turned to Kate.
“Before the insurrection at Manchester, the communication software worked on the mastermind,” she said. “However, that was a very controlled study. We didn’t have much time to finish it before…” She paused. “We lost Dr. Carr and Sammy Tibalt is severely injured, which means any further testing will be difficult.”
“I’m very sorry to hear about Dr. Carr,” Ringgold said. “He was a talented scientist, and his sacrifice will not be in vain. How’s Sammy doing?”
Extinction Cycle: Dark Age Box Set | Books 1-4 Page 67