End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4]

by Isherwood, E. E.

  The guy slammed his hand on his chest where the bullet went in and shot several times into the gravel as he spasmed, then fell face first onto the ground.

  “Nine rounds left,” he said with unnatural calm.

  “He shot Jack and Pete!” a biker shouted from behind the trailer.

  Buck pushed the door open some more and looked almost straight down. The redheaded woman stood there like she’d been frozen by an ice ray.

  He bellowed as loud as he was able, “You have two seconds to get up here if you want to live!”

  His voice appeared to startle her, so he held out his empty hand.

  “Come on!” He beckoned gently.

  She blinked away the spell and climbed up the side of the truck. He didn’t grab her hand to help her in; she was on her own for that. Buck scrambled back to the driver’s side, expertly checked his mirror again, then leaned around the corner of his broken window.

  The bikes were toast, but the bikers were trying to regroup to save their egos.

  He fired at a partial profile of a guy at the rear corner but missed.

  “Eight rounds left,” he said to himself.

  Buck glanced at the woman. She’d shut her door, but she was in shock. She sat with her hands folded on her sage green dress and stared out the front window with a look of terror.

  “We’re going,” he said to her.

  He plopped into his seat and threw off the e-brake, then dropped it into gear. The big Peterbilt lurched again as it strained to pull the heavy load. He tried to look back at the damage he’d wrought, but it was hard to see anything while guiding his truck off the lot.

  A couple of men dressed like ranchers ran across the motel’s front parking lot carrying shotguns. They had probably heard the gunfire and wanted to join in, but Buck didn’t have time to see which side they’d support.

  He had to look ahead.

  There were too many cars already on the two-lane road, but Buck didn’t bother to wait his turn. He turned in a tight arc to the right, forcing cars to stop so as not to hit him. Once he straightened out on the road, he tried to look to his right to see the bikers, but they were already out of view.

  “Can you see them?” he asked the woman. “Are they following us?”

  Like a good combat Marine, he tried to assess enemy capabilities. How many of the gang were still getting gas? What if they had fifty bikers in their club? Would they be more concerned with helping their injured brothers or finding him to get revenge? Buck guessed that two of those he shot would die without proper medical help. Maybe all three.

  They’ll want revenge.

  “We’ve got to put some distance between us and them,” Buck said to the woman after he realized she wasn’t going to look outside her window.

  The warm Beretta had fallen between his legs onto the seat, so he grabbed it and put it on the center console where he could easily reach it.

  As he drove away, he felt certain he would need it again.

  Eight

  Search for Nuclear, Astrophysical, and Kronometric Extremes (SNAKE). Red Mesa, Colorado

  “This whole place runs on magnets,” Faith said to General Smith on the tram ride. “Powerful magnets focus the energy beams as they go around the loop of the collider. It only made sense to have the Silver Bullet use magnetic levitation, too.”

  “Silver Bullet? Is someone afraid of werewolves?” The general was cordial, despite the feeling in the pit of her stomach that she was going to her execution.

  “No, but this looks like a bullet, don’t you think?”

  The big car had sixteen seats in four neat rows, with equal room in the front and back for cargo. They both sat in the front row, but with one open seat between them.

  “I suppose. It beats the crap out of what I use back in the caves of Cheyenne Mountain. My little tram has four tires and bounces along the concrete with barely enough room for me and a driver.”

  She didn’t know what to make of that. “You work in a cave?”

  “Sometimes. I’ve believed for a long time that the US military has become too complacent in our defense posture. There are fewer boogeymen who scare the politicians, which makes us vulnerable. These days most of NORAD’s functions happen at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, but I like to drill out of the old base in Cheyenne Mountain because it is underground.”

  “That actually makes me feel good, you staying prepared.”

  “For anything,” he added.

  Faith lived her life the same way. She’d taken martial-arts as a young girl, spent a lot of time outdoors staying fit, and passed on what she could to her baby sister, Dez. There was nothing more important than being responsible for one’s own safety and well-being, which was why she felt a begrudging kinship with the military man sharing her ride. But there was still a divide between them.

  The tram hardly felt like it was moving, despite how rapidly the lights of the tunnel passed above them.

  “How fast are we going?” the general inquired.

  “The maglev system can get up to three hundred miles per hour, but we have it limited to one hundred. That allows us to get to any flaw in the tunnel in about twenty minutes.”

  “And this is the same tunnel your beams use?”

  “We used drilling equipment similar to what they used for the Chunnel between England and France. It made a tunnel big enough for two lanes of traffic to fit side-by-side in here, but we put a shielded wall down the middle so the tram didn’t interfere with the experimental equipment. The wall also keeps technicians from walking into the tracks and getting hit by speeding bullets.”

  He nodded approval. “I can see that being an issue.”

  They sat in silence until the tram decelerated and stopped a few minutes later. When the doors opened, they revealed a chamber about the size of a school gymnasium. Emergency lights were already on, but additional lights engaged as she stepped out onto the low platform in the middle of the room. It took her eyes a few seconds to adjust to the brightness.

  Stacks of crates filled the back half of the chamber to their right.

  “This is the first insertion room, where they can start the proton beam and send it down the tube. It also serves the function of emergency exit.” She pointed to the huge red word on the far wall to their right, beyond the boxes. EXIT had been painted in five-foot-tall letters over a well-lit door. “Stairs go up to the surface, which is about two hundred feet above.”

  “This place really is a vault,” he said while following her out of the Silver Bullet.

  “Don’t remind me. The loop goes around for 62.5 miles, with checkpoints like this all the way. You are never too far from an exit, but it can get very dark in here.”

  “I bet,” he said, sounding impressed.

  “Those boxes are spares for all the equipment in this stretch of the loop—magnets, cryo tubing, wiring, and so forth. But the collider pipeline is this way.” She pointed to the front half of the chamber.

  Faith inhaled the damp, musty odor that never went away. No matter how exact their drilling and sealing methods, new leaks always showed up.

  They went into the front half of the room, an area clear of boxes. The collider pipe came out of the tunnel about twenty feet to her left, crossed the empty region of the room, and continued into another tunnel about thirty feet to her right. Stout legs with a shock-absorption technology held it off the ground. To the casual viewer, it appeared like an ordinary metal pipe about three feet in diameter, but the insides were packed solid with high-technology components.

  “So, that’s the snake,” she joked.

  A metal staircase went up and over the tubing, providing an easy way for technicians to cross, so General Smith hopped up to get a better position. He peered back and forth like he was on the prow of a ship.

  “General, there’s nothing to see,” she said. “It’s just a pipe inside a dark tunnel. Each twenty-foot section looks like all the others. We’d have to go inside a few yards to get the motion
-sensing lights to activate so you can see more of it, or I could call in and tell the lab to turn on the lights manually. Oh, wait, I don’t have a phone. And the techs aren’t there to answer the call,” she needled.

  There were wall phones every hundred yards inside the tunnel, but the general didn’t need to know that. Her tiny dig was the only way she had to fight back against his draconian security measures.

  He didn’t seem to hear her.

  “I said—” she began.

  “There! What’s that?” He pointed to his right, along the path of the collider.

  He went down the steps on the backside, then ran along the pipeline toward the opening of the next tunnel. She followed as fast as she could.

  “General, I assure you. Nothing is on here except the cryo. If we shut that down completely, it will take a month to re-cool the loop. I kept it on because I’m hedging my bet that we’ll restart soon.” She continued in a voice only she could hear, “Or someone will.”

  The general went directly to the next segment of the stone-chiseled tunnel. He pushed aside a washing machine-sized cardboard box.

  “Please don’t move things,” she said weakly.

  He pointed at an object in the darkness near him.

  “Tell me, doctor, what do you call this? Is it for the cryogenics?”

  She caught up but stopped about ten feet away. He stood next to a new piece of equipment she’d never seen before. The other boxes had been blocking it. It looked like a metal refrigerator.

  “This is what I came to see,” General Smith said. He pointed to a faint blue beam about six inches wide. It appeared to come out of the side of the fridge and zap into the collider at a shallow angle.

  “I don’t know what this is. Nothing like this should be here,” she replied weakly, but she could feel the anger build. “How did you even see this? I’ve checked every foot of this loop. It took me two weeks to do it, but I wanted to be sure it was all in tip-top shape for our first experiment. This wasn’t in the design.” She hadn’t checked it since they started the Izanagi Project, but no one could have added equipment while the beams were active.

  “Well, it’s here,” he said matter-of-factly. “And my people tell me similar energy readings were found at three other locations around your ring.”

  The revelation shocked her. “There are more of these?”

  General Smith nodded. “I ask again—what aren’t you telling me?”

  She gritted her teeth in fury—not at the general, but at someone else.

  Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Kingston Station

  Getting off the train in Canberra was like going back to normal Australia. The train station was the size of a kiosk compared to Sydney, and it backed up to a dusty grass field rather than a big city. It was a relief to not see panicked people everywhere.

  She stepped onto the platform with the other passengers and moved toward the building. A few people milled about, probably to catch the train back to Sydney, but that was about it for activity.

  Before she went inside, five or six men came out of the train’s middle car. They were dressed in old fatigues like they were hunters or mercenaries.

  Or poachers.

  As a naturalist on one of the wildest continents on Earth, she’d seen good and bad hunters her whole career. It was impossible to know one from the other by looking at them, and poachers sometimes didn’t even think they were the bad guys.

  These men carried large black duffels and walked toward the other end of the platform rather than into the station.

  She turned her attention to the brightly lit station house and went inside to check it out. A dozen men and women in business suits came off the train and walked through the far end of the station at the same time she went in, but went directly out the front doors. A pair of waiting black vans slid open their doors and the travelers boarded.

  “You must have come in with those hoity-toity types,” a man said to her.

  Her friend sat by himself on one of the bench seats, but he jumped up when she looked his way.

  “Zandre!”

  “Hey, Dez.” They hugged. “I didn’t think you were going to bloody make it, mate. They lost the Canberra to Sydney train last night, and they couldn’t tell me if your train was coming in, either.”

  “What do you mean, they lost it?” she asked.

  “News says it made it to Moss Vale, but it never showed up in Sydney. Don’t ask me where it went. Nobody knows.”

  “There’s been a lot of strange shit going on,” she replied. “The opera house is gone. Did you know that?”

  He nodded as they walked out the front doors of the small terminal. “Yep. We haven’t lost anything in the Capital Territory, but I’ve heard of missing landmarks in Sydney, Brisbane, and other places up the Sunshine Coast.”

  “What about the rest of ‘Straya?” she asked.

  “Haven’t heard much from Perth or the West, but you wouldn’t expect much from out there.”

  “No, I guess not,” she replied. The middle and western half of the country was about as populated as the moon.

  They got into a modern pickup truck with clean seats and a lovely smell. Compared to Christian’s beater ute, it was like sitting in a million-dollar sports car. She felt bad that the guy’s Commodore was probably burned to a crisp now, but it made her feel a little better that she had helped save the man’s life.

  “So, tell me about the Wollemi Fire. Heard it was a beaut.”

  “Yeah, it was a total fuckup,” she said a bit distantly. “Maybe some other time. Right now, I want to know about this extinct bird you’ve found.”

  “I’ll tell you on the way. You simply won’t believe me, though, until we get there.”

  Highway 395, California

  Buck spent almost as much time watching his side mirrors as he did watching the road ahead. The two-lane blacktop highway widened to four lanes as it went up a steep hill. The higher he went, the better he could see Mono Lake down in the basin behind him, but it was slow going. The Peterbilt struggled to pull the heavy payload faster than thirty-five miles per hour on the hills.

  I could drop the trailer.

  When he’d talked to Mr. Williams yesterday, the company owner had mentioned that some of his drivers had dumped their loads and bobtailed home with no trailer behind them. Buck assured his boss he wasn’t going to be one of those guys, but now that he had a pack of thugs hunting for him…

  He could get lost on side roads without the heavy trailer, but it would require pulling off the road to unhook it. That didn’t seem like a winning proposition, either.

  Cars and trucks whizzed by as they went around him on the uphill. Fewer vehicles came from the north, which might have been a good sign. Nothing was chasing people away up there.

  Buck checked his mirror once again, certain a pack of motorcycles would appear at any second and surprised when they didn’t.

  “Holy shit!” the woman yelled with sudden passion. “I almost died!”

  Her volume startled him and his head spin almost gave him whiplash, but he refrained from saying anything insensitive like, “What the fuck?” Her teary eyes made him realize he’d almost ignored her for the past ten minutes as he concentrated on driving. “Hey, it’s all right. You’re okay.”

  She brushed locks of red hair out of her eyes and opened her mouth to say something, but she was unable to speak further. While she didn’t openly sob, her chest heaved like she held back a lake’s worth of tears.

  He searched for the correct thing to say. “It’s normal to be scared shitless after being in a life-or-death situation.”

  I’m shaking too, he thought to himself. He didn’t dare lift his hands off the wheel or she might see them trembling as the adrenaline high died down. It had been a long time since he’d experienced the rush of combat, and it was just as bad as he remembered it.

  “Those men,” she said with a choked-up voice. “They took my keys and told me they’d shoot me if I ran. Oh
, god…”

  He worried she was going to descend into uselessness, which would have been normal after anyone’s first time in a gunfight. He hoped she wouldn’t and waited patiently, opting to say nothing instead of the wrong thing.

  “I’m sorry,” she went on, “for getting you mixed up in this.” She absentmindedly spun one of the wide bracelets she wore on each wrist. The worn silver matched her necklace as if they were a set.

  He croaked a tense laugh. “Getting me mixed up? You probably didn’t realize I was the one who stirred up the hornet’s nest when I asked them to move their bikes. Besides, I owed you one for backing me up outside your door.”

  Was Fred okay? He’d lost track of the motel guy during the chaos. For a millisecond, Buck felt guilty that he didn’t know how the guy was, but he had threatened Buck and been no help in the fight. Buck had thrown in with the woman to save her from the violent bikers, so if he had a duty to anyone, it was her.

  The woman. He didn’t know her name.

  More cars passed them on the uphill climb, but they were getting close to the top. Fred’s motel was getting farther and farther away with each turn of the wheels. The biker gang could have been anywhere from Fred’s to just around the last corner.

  “Thank you,” she said in what was barely a whisper. “For saving me.”

  He smiled and pulled his right hand off the wheel as a test. It wasn’t shaking anymore, so he reached over to her. “I’m Buck. Pleased to meet you.”

  She took his hand and squeezed surprisingly hard. “I’m Connie.”

  The warmth of her hand drew him to her like a comforting fire on a snowy night, but he pulled away before he became “that guy.”

  “Why did they have to park behind my truck? Why did they have to start the fight?” Buck wondered aloud.

  Worse, he thought back to the riot at Walmart. Buck figured it was his talk with the World War II veteran that had kicked it all off. Now, in some dumpy motel parking lot, he’d done the same thing with Connie. If he’d jumped in his truck first thing, he would have avoided Fred and Connie both and would have been on his way.