Fact number two: Ilk Krallik was going to target the top fifty largest cities in the world with the VXM. They'd already found a whole bunch of local underground sellers for the planes they needed across Europe, North America, and Asia. They had plenty of supporters to choose from to fly those planes, so it was only a matter of time before they attacked. I was sure they’d want to do it sooner rather than later, not risking their operation getting shut down before they managed to do what they’d set out to do.
I really didn’t want to be the only one holding this information. I very dearly wanted someone on this crazy train with me—someone who could give me some advice about what the hell we were supposed to do. Maybe even how we were supposed to do it, because I was fresh out of ideas. The problem was, everyone I’d talked to had shot me right down.
And I was running out of contacts.
I really, really, really didn’t want to call the FBI. Yeah, I had a direct number to someone who worked there, but he didn’t work in counter-terrorism or whatever department usually dealt with cults. But he’d know other people who could probably help. And if he didn’t know them, he’d at least be able to tell me how to find those people. In theory. If he decided to talk to me at all.
He also knew every inch of my history, what I’d been in Juvenile Hall for, how long I’d spent there, and what the terms of my parole were. He probably had a big old chunky folder on me, and FBI folders probably didn’t skimp on the details. Which meant that whoever I talked to—Prosser, or anyone in any other department—would come into the conversation with a very firm opinion of who I was and what I was all about.
Not only would they probably think I was running some kind of scam, they would almost certainly know exactly how I’d come across the story in the first place. They would know, further, that getting that story on the dark web meant I’d been violating my parole—on top of what they already had on me from when I was researching stories for Ashland Weekly.
I would have been in trouble in triplicate. And I would have been fucking stupid to have called their attention to it. If they didn’t already know, I couldn’t show them.
The trouble was… that was starting to look like my last and best chance of getting anything done about the impending end of the world as we knew it.
I ran my hands through the tight black coils of my hair for the hundredth time that morning and allowed the level of panic running through my veins to increase tenfold.
I had information that I knew was important. Information that could determine the fate of the lives of a whole lot of people. Information that, if I passed it on, could be used to potentially stop a terrorist attack. This was the sort of thing you were supposed to tell law enforcement about. It was the sort of lead that most journalists would have killed for.
And I was stuck in an absolute corner. The journalists I knew wouldn’t touch it because it was too crazy, and I no doubt sounded like a woman possessed. Hell, maybe they thought I was part of the cult myself and was trying to recruit members or something. My old boss, my most recent newspaper contact, had just fired me for breaking the rules, and sure as hell wouldn't have a hand in breaking any himself.
Worst of all, law enforcement was looking less and less like an option. They probably weren’t going to believe me any more than anyone else had. They’d blow me off, too, and the moment I called them, I’d set myself up for being arrested for breaking my parole—if they weren’t already on the way here to arrest me, anyway.
This Ilk Krallik group was the real thing; I could feel it deep down in my reporting, hacking, rule-breaking bones. They were serious about what they were doing, and everything I could find pointed right to the terrifying conclusion that they’d found a way to accomplish their goal. From what I'd seen, they were already halfway there, and that was two weeks ago. They realistically had one detail left to sort out, which was who would fly the planes, so that meant millions or even billions of people were about to die, and soon. A week, tops?
And I was the only one who knew about it. Or rather, the only good guy who knew about it.
The problem was, it was starting to look like I was really, really bad at being a hero with absolutely no one on my side.
Chapter 6
I could barely sit still on the bus ride. It felt like bugs were crawling through my veins, through my skin. My brain was buzzing with information, my heart hammering away at my ribs with terror.
I cast a quick and supposed-to-be furtive glance over my shoulder, my eyes scanning the people on the bus, but they all looked normal. Just a bunch of people from Ashland traveling to wherever they were going on a Tuesday afternoon. They didn’t look like terrorists. Or cultists. They didn’t look like people who believed they should clear out the world’s population so they could take over and start to build their kingdom, or whatever the hell it was the Ilk Krallikers wanted to do.
But then I bit my lip and narrowed my eyes. The Ilk Krallikers probably did just look like normal people. I doubted they went around wearing badges of their logo and slogan—that would be insane, right?
Shit. What if there was one right behind me, and I didn’t know about it? How would I recognize him? I threw a glance at the guy behind me—an old man with gray hair, his eyes magnified to about ten times their normal size by the seventies-style glasses he was wearing. He looked like someone’s grandpa. He probably played chess and had a favorite sitcom he stayed up late to watch on Tuesdays.
Or.
Or those glasses were a disguise. Maybe they helped him see right through the person he was looking at. That hair wasn’t actually gray; it was dyed to look that way. He had a gun hidden under that tweed jacket of his.
My God, get a grip, I told myself forcefully, making myself turn around. If I went on like this much longer, I was going to give myself a serious panic attack, a stroke, or a heart attack. Maybe all three.
But at least then I’d be dead. I wouldn’t have to worry about the plot to end the world anymore.
To keep myself busy, I focused on the scenery going by and tried to nail down what I was going to do when I got to Jeff’s house.
Jeff. My more-than-somewhat-odd uncle, and the man who had partially raised me. My parents died in a car crash when I was five, and Jeff had been babysitting me the night they died. He was the first (and only) family member to step up and invite me into his home.
It had been the only good era of my childhood that I remembered, and I still smiled when I thought of it. Too much time spent in front of the TV, watching old black-and-white alien movies. Home-cooked, almost always homegrown food every night—fast food every now and then, when we were willing to risk going into the outside world. The enormous garden in the backyard, complete with everything anyone could have wished for in vegetable and fruit varieties.
Jeff believed in living off the grid, and that meant that he worked only odd jobs—ones that paid him under the table—and grew as much of his own food as he could. After spending most of his younger years as what I could only have assumed as normal, he'd had a serious epiphany about the world when he was in his thirties and had gone underground. He'd gotten himself legally declared dead, gotten rid of his driver's license, the lot. He'd pretty much fully disappeared from society.
Jeff had refused to send me to school, because it might have meant someone asking questions about who I was staying with. Looking back, I couldn’t figure out how he’d managed to get a hold of me in the first place. Because, surely, he’d had to have admitted his existence for CPS to have given him a kid. Surely, he’d had to have proven he was adept at… well, life, in order to prove that he was able to take care of me.
I tipped my head as I thought about it, though, and I started to see something I hadn’t noticed at the time. Jeff had barely worked. When he had, it was always the oddest of odd jobs, and they never lasted. I’d been a kid, and had had absolutely no idea how the world had worked. I hadn’t known that jobs were supposed to be full-time things.
But we’d ne
ver lacked money. In fact, we’d always had plenty of it. The house was huge, and Jeff had never had a problem buying me whatever I needed—toys, clothes, etc. He'd always had me see a doctor when I needed a checkup or shots… and, come to think of it, the doctor I saw was definitely expensive, since she always made home visits. Now, with my adult eyes, I saw the whole thing in a brand-new light. Jeff had had money coming in from somewhere. Or, he’d been independently wealthy, maybe from whatever full-time job he'd had in his twenties?
If he’d had that much money, surely he’d gotten it from somewhere. Surely he’d left a record in doing so. Money changed everything, and it could have been the key there. Maybe the government had known about him the whole time, and had just pretended they didn’t. Maybe that was why they’d let him raise me for a couple of years.
Unfortunately, it didn’t last. I’d lived with him from the age of five until just after my eighth birthday. At that point, something happened—I still didn’t know what, but I suspected the not going to school thing was a primary issue, though Jeff did a good job of homeschooling me, since when I started school, I was well ahead of my peers. Still, I’d been shoved into the foster system. I’d spent the next eight years fighting every family I was placed with, trying to get back to Jeff. Back to my actual family. Back to someone who had let me be who I was.
Back to the place I’d felt I like actually belonged.
I’d failed. Repeatedly. And I’d been punished for trying to run away—repeatedly. But it had never stopped me.
In fact, the idea that people who didn’t know me, and who didn’t own me, were trying to punish me for following my heart, was probably the biggest reason I’d taken the route I did.
Look, I wasn’t any kind of psychologist. But I had common sense and people sense, and it didn’t seem like a big jump to say that I’d been unhappy with my life, and therefore had gone out of my way to change that—even if it meant breaking the law. Repeatedly, and intentionally.
Even after I started getting caught.
I shook my head, sending those thoughts flying into the cold, cloudy morning outside the window, and turned my mind back to my current mission. That was the important part. Not the things that had led me here.
Right. Current route. I’d run through and failed with all of my contacts in the press—and anywhere else—and had, in the end, decided not to call the FBI. I didn’t want to end up back in custody. How could I stop the end of the world from happening from the inside of a prison cell?
So, I started making plans for another direction. Uncle Jeff, as crazy as he was, definitely also had some connections. He was part of a doomsday prepper... well, club, I supposed was a good name for it. He was, in fact, a member who was pretty high up in the organization. As such, he was connected to their publication which regularly printed conspiracy theories—everything from the aliens coming back, to the secret shadow government that was actually running the entire world.
If anyone was going to believe that a group of cultists were trying to conduct a terrorist attack on the world using a nerve agent, it was them. That publication would absolutely thrive on a story like that. In fact, it was so perfect that the moment I’d thought of it, I’d slapped myself for not thinking of it sooner.
Then, I’d given myself the reason I hadn’t thought of it any sooner. No one in their right mind read that publication. And no one in their right mind would believe anything it printed.
But they were still my best and only shot, at this point. And since I was starting to get desperate—and feeling like this attack might happen at any moment—I was taking the trip out of town to reconnect with Uncle Jeff and tell him my story.
Hey, playing the hero means you have to pursue any avenue, no matter how crazy, to save the world. And I had to admit that I was going to be happy—and more than a little bit relieved—to see my uncle again. I was tired of being told I was a nut-job. I wanted someone to listen to what I said and actually believe me.
I wanted someone else who would do something about it.
Uncle Jeff welcomed me home with open arms, just like I’d hoped he would, his tousled salt-and-pepper hair standing up in spikes around his head like he hadn’t brushed it in months. Just how it had always looked.
My uncle had always been too cool, too eccentric for the rest of the world. He’d known exactly what was going on around us, and he’d been so intense about it that he had convinced me, too. I’d grown up thinking that he was the only one who knew the truth—and even when I got old enough to realize that he was more than a little bit kooky, that perspective had never completely left me.
That was why I flew into his arms like a little girl who was finally coming home—because I was.
We sat down on his front porch with two cups of coffee, and then, he listened to every single word I had to say, God love him. He sat there and nodded and frowned just like he needed to, giving me grunts of concern in all the right places. I gave him the ranting speech I’d perfected over the last two days, my sentences running together—punctuation something I didn’t have time for—and within ten minutes, the entire story was floating in the air between us, just waiting for him to do something with it. When I finally stopped talking, I stared at him, held my breath, and waited.
I wanted him to tell me what to do. I needed him to tell me what to do.
But between the two of us, I was, realistically, the better equipped for this. I’d been in Juvie; I’d been prosecuted by the FBI themselves—and I was still being watched by them. Jeff might have been a little crazy, and the government might have been keeping an eye on him, but he wasn’t a criminal like me.
Something about that made me straighten my shoulders and try to inject a little steel in my backbone. I wasn’t the eight-year-old kid who didn’t know any better anymore. I was an adult. Kind of. At least, more of a 'proper' adult than Jeff.
To my surprise, he reached out and grabbed my shoulder instead of answering. He gave it a squeeze and then nodded to himself as if I’d told him something he'd already suspected.
“I knew it,” he sighed, his voice coming out in a rasp, like he’d inhaled too much dust over the years. “I knew something was going on. One of my contacts told me that he’d been hearing whispers. You’ve come to the right place, my girl. Your Uncle Jeff is the perfect guy for the job.”
Something inside me eased and I breathed out. Finally, someone believed me!
“Do you have someone who would print this story?” I asked quickly. “Someone who would put it into that publication your club makes? We have to get this information out. People have to know that this is going on. We have to—”
He yanked me toward him by the wrist so suddenly that I didn’t have a chance to react—luckily, we'd already finished our coffees and put the mugs on the deck.
Uncle Jeff pulled me towards the front door, and we were moving at a speed that made me want to shoot a glance over my shoulder to see who was after us. What was going on? Was the FBI storming the house? Was there a hurricane coming?
Or had the Ilk Krallikers suddenly shown up, wearing big signs that said, We’re here to kill that girl? Some warning sign that my uncle understood immediately?
I briefly managed to look over my shoulder, horrified—only to see nothing. Nothing but the wide-open fields that made up the land around Jeff's country house.
In a split-second, we were through the front door and dashing down the hallway I remembered from when I was a kid. I saw a blur of the faded green wallpaper in the living room, and then my uncle turned toward a door I didn’t remember. He threw it open, pushed me down the stairs on the other side, hit a switch to turn on a light, and then slammed the door, cutting me off from the world above me.
Chapter 7
I banged on that fucking door for what felt like an hour—which gave me enough time to realize that it was probably soundproofed. It was made out of some sort of smooth metal and didn’t have a handle on my side. Instead, there was what I could only deduce as a
fingerprint scanner.
I was positive I wasn’t going to be able to open it by myself, regardless of the existence of a small hole that could have taken a key. I’d never been good at picking locks. Of course, I’d tried, but that didn’t change the fact that I was a hacker, not a physical thief. I was good with my brain, not my fingers.
I don’t know how long I screamed and banged on that door, but after a while, just when my screaming and banging was starting to decrease in frequency and volume, the door was thrown open again and a bunch of people came rushing in, forcing me down the stairs—backward, this time—and into a small room down below.
I came to a standstill, my mind in a whirl, and stared at the mob that had decided to join me.
As it turned out, it wasn’t actually a mob. It was only four other people. One of them was Jeff, and the others were complete strangers. Which was beside the point, honestly. I was furious, and I had several things to say to my bat-shit-crazy uncle.
“What the hell are you doing?” I screeched, storming right up to him and pushing him in the chest.
Yeah, the guy was a head taller than me. Yeah, he was older and also my uncle, and maybe I should have had some respect. But he'd just locked me in a fucking cellar!
I’d lived a life where a system I didn’t respect and didn’t understand had taken control of my life, forced me into homes that weren’t mine. Families I didn’t know had taken advantage of me. They’d locked me in my room and refused to feed me enough—even though they were getting paid to take care of me. They'd let kids at school bully me, played favorites with their own children versus me. But no one had ever dared to lay a physical hand on me. Certainly, no one had tried to kidnap me.
Survival of The Fittest | Book 1 | The Fall Page 4