GMO 24- Harvest 

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Table of Contents

GMO 24- Harvest 

FREE Prequel- GMO 24 Coalition

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

FREE Prequel- GMO 24 Coalition

The  first book in this series- GMO 24- Coalition- Can be downloaded for FREE Here-  http://amzn.to/1z7al1H

The second book- GMO 24- Infertile can be downloaded here: http://amzn.to/1JHWWAS

Chapter 1

The well of blood in the bullet hole had finally run dry, leaving a clotted crimson stain on Todd’s shoulder, with dried, red streaks down his arm, chest, and stomach. The hours of being tied to the chair had stiffened Todd’s body to the point of concrete, and with each blow across his face, stomach, and body, he could feel the cracking fault lines spreading across his cemented muscles and bones. A thick coat of sweat and blood covered the swollen flesh on his face, leaving him almost unrecognizable. He pulled lightly, and fruitlessly, against the duct tape around his wrists and ankles, keeping him in place for whatever other tortures his captors could conjure.

The room was small and made even more cramped by the four other bodies inside. Three of the men were sentries, each of them with the sleeves of their uniforms rolled up and their knuckles shimmering red. They’d all taken turns on him, a violent contest of who could inflict the most pain, but Todd couldn’t be sure anymore who had taken the lead.

Todd sat in the only piece of furniture in the room, but the others were comfortable standing in their positions of power. A hand grabbed a fistful of Todd’s hair and yanked him back, exposing every cut, bruise, and gash along his face under the fluorescent lighting.

Todd’s left eye had swollen shut, but as the man holding him hostage shifted over to his right, Gordon’s face slowly came into view.

“What. Is. The password?” Gordon asked.

Drips of sweat fell from the slick sheen on Gordon’s face and into the cuts along Todd’s cheek. Each drop burned and triggered a twitch in Todd’s one good eye.

“Every second you make me wait is one more where I get to hurt you,” Gordon said, pressing his finger into the bullet hole on Todd’s shoulder. “So why don’t you help yourself out?”

Gordon’s finger pierced the flesh slowly, digging his way into the meat and filling the well once more with blood. Every inch that Gordon prodded his finger deeper into the meat of Todd’s shoulder blinded his mind with pain, generating cold shakes and tremors throughout his body. Finally, with the pain reaching a crescendo, Gordon removed his finger.

Not realizing he’d been holding his breath, Todd exhaled in a large gasp, and his body slouched, his muscles releasing their control from the relief of pain. But it was short lived, as Gordon sent his fist into Todd’s ribs, knocking him over.

Todd smacked against the floor. The crack of the wooden chair was matched by the snap in Todd’s left arm. The lightning strike of pain was quickly replaced by a sprawling numbness until nothing but a slight tingle was left in his fingertips.

“Pick him up!” Gordon said.

The scuffle of blurred boots crossed the path of his one good eye, and he felt the room shift from horizontal to vertical.

“Untie his hands,” Gordon said.

The numbness in Todd’s left arm morphed into knives tearing into flesh as the sentries roughly unwrapped the tape around his wrists, but kept his ankles tied. With the muscles in his neck forgoing their support of his head, all Todd could see were the tips of Gordon’s shoes. They were black, leather. The kind you’d wear to a formal dinner, or church, listening to the preacher speak at the altar. But the altar in this room was built for sacrificial lambs, and Gordon had willingly set him upon it.

“Hold his hands out,” Gordon said.

One pair of thick hands held Todd’s shoulders, pinning him down, and the other two pairs grabbed hold of his wrists. What little vision Todd had in his right eye faded. It wouldn’t be long before it completely swelled shut. But he had just enough eyesight left to see the pliers in Gordon’s hand. Todd clenched his right fist shut, but his broken left arm wouldn’t respond to the same commands, leaving his fingernails exposed and vulnerable.

Gordon placed the tip of the pliers on the end of the nail on Todd’s left index finger. Todd gave a few panicked thrashes, but his pain and fatigue couldn’t overpower the strength of the sentries surrounding him. Gordon applied a steady, even pressure, pulling on the nail. Todd’s breathing accelerated. His pulse skyrocketed. Adrenaline coursed through his body, igniting the sharp awareness of the pain to come.

“What’s the password, Todd?” Gordon asked.

The detachment was slow, the cuticle separating from the tender flesh it protected. Each increased increment of tension from Gordon added to the anticipation of pain, which would crescendo until the final crash, where it would end until Gordon grabbed hold of the next nail. Torture was an art form. And Gordon had all the tools he needed to finish his masterpiece.

Todd’s continued insubordination was punished with one quick tug from the pliers. Todd’s limbs released a series of knee-jerk reaction of reflexes as blood flooded the tender, exposed flesh. Gordon dropped the hardened piece of keratin to the floor and guided the tip of the pliers to the next nail.

“We can do this for every single one of your fingers and toes, Todd,” Gordon said.

Todd kept his one good eye locked onto Gordon. No matter what he did to him, no matter what he threatened him with, no matter the excruciating amount of pain Gordon inflicted, Todd was not giving it up. He gathered what saliva was left in his mouth and spit on Gordon’s cheek.

Gordon released Todd’s middle nail and dropped the pliers. The goons around Todd kept their hold on him as Gordon twirled the pliers around in his hand and wiped the spit from his face. “Bring her over!” Gordon’s voice boomed against the room’s walls and Todd could feel his heart sink at the sound of those words. A heightened panic rushed over him.

A few moments passed before the door to Todd’s chamber swung open aggressively. The man with the black jacket, whom he’d remembered from a blood inspection over a month ago, held his wife by the scruff of her neck and threw her to the floor with the same violence with which he entered.

Emma’s face was covered in welts, cuts, and bruises. The result of Todd’s silence was there in front of him. His own wife, writhing in pain. They had done this because of him. This was his fault. He brought that evil on her.

Gordon pulled Emma’s head up by the tangled nest that was her hair, further exposing the details of torture. “Such a pity,” Gordon said. “Not sure she’s as fuckable as she used to be.” He snapped his fingers and held out his hand, to which Jake handed him the pistol from his shoulder holster. Gordon jammed the barrel against Emma’s temple and placed his finger on the trigger. “What’s the password, Todd?”

“This isn’t how you’re going to get what you want,” Todd answered.

Gordon viciously smacked Emma’s cheek with the side of the pistol and she hit the floor with a crack that echoed through Todd’s body, followed by a wail of uncontrollable curses from Todd’s mouth. “YoufuckingsonofabitchIwillkillyou!” He thrashed against the sentries still holding him down, ignoring the firing synapses of pain his brain was triggering from his jerky motions.

Gordon repositioned the barrel of the gun against Emma’s temple. “I’m going to count to three. If you don’t give me the password to your encrypted data by the time I get there, then I’m going to kill her. One.”

“I’ll tell you,” Todd said, his voice high, weak, and cracking from the strenuous screams his throat had echoed for the past hour. Gordon lowered his pistol and wiped his hands clean of the soiled torture they were stained with.

“See?” Gordon asked. “It wasn’t that hard, was it?”

All of the work and toil over the years, all of Todd’s sacrifices, all of his wife’s sacrifices, were about to be for naught. Gordon would have complete access to Todd’s work, and the balance of power would now be shifted in his favor. How did this happen?

The compass of blame he’d pointed at himself when they were captured suddenly shifted in another direction. The tip of the needle aimed beyond the bodies in the room to somewhere in the distance. Todd was guilty of trust, yes, but he was not to blame for their current predicament. No, that was the fault of the one man who betrayed him. Alex Grives.

***

One by one, the community members grabbed the rifles, shotguns, and pistols from the sentry’s armory and loaded them into the trucks on Main Street, doing their best to step around the fresh streaks of blood on the sentry’s housing floor.

A few other community members were coming in and out of the meal station, piling any nonperishable goods they could take next to the weapons in the truck. Much to their displeasure, the only food they could find were the synthetic proteins and minerals they’d grown accustomed to tolerating. Anything that was fresh was consumed at lunch, in the largest feast any of them had seen in years.

Alex, however, didn’t partake in the spontaneous potluck. He sat perched at the community’s front gate, his face and clothes still bloodied and dirtied from the night before. He’d barely moved for most of the night and morning. Watching, waiting for another unit of sentries to force their way in. He’d stolen one of the radio scanners, which he monitored for any unscheduled check-ins the Coalition might try. So far, the call hadn’t come.

What he did hear were the Coalition’s forces in the west being overrun. A unit of United States soldiers were liberating communities and farm camps through Wyoming and marching southeast to their main target, which lay in the heart of Topeka, Kansas. It was there where Commissioner Gordon Reath sat atop his throne of skeletons and slaves, and it was where Alex needed to join them in their coup of his oppression. But he first had to make sure his people were safe. That had been his goal since the beginning. Now, with the cavalry heading their way, the job was almost done.

“Alex?”

Meeko appeared to his left, his hands clasped together, his left foot rubbing the top of his right, looking down at the ground and keeping his distance. Alex became more aware of the bloodstains covering his body. He knew the sights from the night before were still fresh in the boy’s mind. “Did you get enough to eat?”

“Yeah,” Meeko answered then extended a plate that had a pile of potatoes, corn, and chicken stacked on top. “Harper wanted me to give this to you.”

Alex examined the small mounds of food. Steam rose from the plate. He couldn’t remember the last time he actually ate something that was hot. But these days, no matter how the food was prepared, everything had the metallic taste of blood. Alex took the plate from Meeko, and the moment he looked down at the food in front of him, he heard the light patter of feet scurry away. The boy saw him differently now. Watching someone you cared about soak themselves in blood would do that.

“You don’t want that to get cold,” Harper said, taking a seat next to Alex at the front gate. Harper and Alex were around the same age, but the past few weeks accelerated the lines of experience on both their faces.

“I’m sorry about Alice,” Alex said. “If I hadn’t left, she’d probably still be alive.”

Harper remained quiet, fiddling with his fingers before he finally answered. “But I wonder for how long? People have been dying every day since the soil crisis, and most have suffered a fate worse than death. Now that she’s gone, she’s spared from any more suffering.” He placed his hand on Alex’s shoulder. “Her death isn’t your burden to bear, Alex. It’s mine.”

The truth was clouded in a series of what-ifs. If it weren’t for the scientists who created GMO-24, then this world wouldn’t have been possible. Gordon Reath would never have risen to power. The Soil Coalition would never have been assembled. Alex would never have joined the sentry program, which would never have put him in the same zip code as Gordon Reath. He would never have had to break Meeko and Harper out of the farm camp, which would have allowed Alice to live, which wouldn’t have sent him to another community to betray one of the most brilliant minds of the century. But this wasn’t a world of what-ifs. This was reality. And the first step in fixing the world was trying to right his unforgiveable wrong against Todd Penn.

***

The tank’s tracks ground up whatever dirt or debris they rolled over on its detoured journey north. Commander Luis Claire let the wind whip the dirt and grease smudged on his face as he rode atop the tank’s open hatch, his broad shoulders almost too big for the entrance. The tank had the capacity to travel at speeds of up to forty-five miles per hour, so the wind cutting across him was quite harsh, but he didn’t mind. If he closed his eyes and just felt the wind against his cheeks, it was almost like being back on one of his ships. A tank was a poor substitute for a destroyer, but being in the Navy for the past fifteen years had made him biased. Seawater coursed through his veins, and the further inland he traveled, the drier he became. But his current objective overrode his thirst for the ocean.

Luis had received orders to continue his campaign into Oklahoma, then Kansas, but he first needed to find two men stuck somewhere in the untamed land of north Wyoming. These men knew who betrayed his sister, putting her in Gordon Reath’s twisted hands.

Ben, the old man who guided Luis to the hidden lab where Emma and Todd had completed their work, did the best he could in giving a description of Alex but had no exact location of where he was.

The Coalition wasn’t known for pardoning its community members or granting any sense of mercy. Reath ruled his subordinates with a spiked, poison-tipped iron fist. He didn’t just hurt people—he mutilated them. The farm camps were built on a foundation of corpses. Each day they added to it, raising their factories of death higher.

“There,” Ben said, shouting from inside the tank. “Just to the east.”

A significant piece of earth had been dislodged and exposed an opening, which revealed a staircase. The tank came to a stop, and Luis jumped to the ground in one swift, powerful motion. When he landed, the large piece of metal that was used to conceal Todd’s lab rattled. They were the only people around for miles, but Luis drew his sidearm out of habit and descended into the dark cavern below.

“Who’s there?” a voice called.

“Commander Luis Claire, United States Navy.”

“Christ, Luis! It’s Ray!”

Luis hurried down the steps and found the generator. He cranked it to life, turning on the lights that revealed both Ray and Nelson, bound together at the end of the lab. Luis holstered his pistol and pulled out his knife to cut the men free. “You two all right?”

The blade sliced through the rope used to subdue the two of them, and they both rubbed their wrists. “Yeah,” Ray said. “We’re okay.”

“Ray, I don’t have a lot of time. I need you to tell me everything you know about the man who was here. The hunter.”

“Fucking two-faced traitor is what he is,” Ray answered, sulking around the lab’s main table, still rubbing the tender flesh under his wrists and working out the stiffness in his legs from being bound up for almost an entire day. “He was from some community in Kansas, at least that’s what he told us. I don’t know if it’s true or not.”

“I need to find him, Ray. And I need to find him quickly.”

“I could probably hack into the database and see where they’re keeping them,” Nelson said.

“You can do that?” Luis asked.

Nelson wiggled his way around Ray and took a seat in front of his computer. A few quick keystrokes and hundreds of lines of code and pieces of data flew across the screen. “It shouldn’t be too difficult.” Nelson’s fingers turned into blurs over the keyboard. “There, it looks like Alex was taken back to his community in west Kansas.”

“What about Emma and Todd?” Luis asked. “Can you find them?”

Another few quick strokes, and a massive error message filled the screen. Nelson quickly backtracked and tried another way in but was met with the same result. “They’re not coming up.”

Luis gripped the table next to him for support, hoping the other two men didn’t notice. The same sturdy legs that had weathered countless storms on the unforgiving ocean waves could barely keep him upright on level ground. If they weren’t in Gordon’s databases, then he wasn’t sure what Gordon was doing to them. They were most likely in Topeka, which was the heart of the Coalition’s infrastructure. It was surrounded by farm camps and communities armed with tens of thousands of sentries.

Invading Topeka was the endgame for the military’s push against the Coalition, but it would be some time before they could take the Coalition’s capital. And Luis wasn’t even sure if Emma and Todd would be alive by then.

Chapter 2

The decorated chests and five-starred bars stretching across the shoulders of the president’s chiefs of staff remained reserved in the stone-etched expressions of the war-weathered generals in the president’s war room. Each gave their strategic advice to the president for his decision in taking control of the Coalition. At the helm of that top military brass was Admiral Frizen, who’d taken the lead as the official commander of the United States war efforts.

Last year, Admiral Frizen celebrated his thirtieth anniversary as a member of the armed forces and his fifty-ninth on this earth. Despite the patches of white and gray that had woven their way onto his head over the past decade, he still retained some remnants of the brown hair of his youth. His face and body, however, had maintained youthful exuberance, despite accumulating six decades of life lived. Of all the joint chiefs, he was the only one who still looked like he could join his men on the front lines.

“Mr. President, the Navy’s countermeasure for the Soil Coalition was put into place during the first few months of the Coalition’s existence. It was kept off the books in case the Coalition ever became a threat, and to also help supplement the research efforts set forth to find a solution to the damage done by GMO-24. The team was assembled through a mixture of military and civilian personnel. Heading that team for the Navy was Commander Luis Claire, who was stationed at Everett Naval Base, a low-key military installation where infantry assets were stored to stay out of the reach of the Coalition during their acquisition of many of the Army’s resources,” Admiral Frizen said.

Outside of Commander Claire’s unit, there were only a handful of other people, both military and civilian alike, who knew about the countermeasure. It was a hand that Frizen played close to the chest. He had advised against the formation of the Coalition since the beginning, but reelection fears overpowered the decision-making process.

“Wyoming was originally chosen due to its distance away from the earlier Coalition communities, as well as the soil quality during that same time. The civilian team that Commander Claire organized comprised Nelson Willow, PhD in computer science and analytics, Ray Nickle, PhD in statistics, Todd Penn, PhD in biochemistry, and Emma Claire, MD. Their task was the research and resolution of the soil effects created by GMO-24. Now, the last communication we had coming out of Wyoming from that team was one of success.”

The quiet seal of the room broke open as the president’s staff erupted with a slew of questions and accusations.

“How could you keep this from the president?”

“What were the civilians’ credentials? Were they vetted?”

“When was the last point of contact?”

“Where is Commander Claire stationed now?”

Out of all the shouting and questions that Frizen took on the chin, none of them asked the most important question until Jared Farnes, who sat just to the right of the president, rose and quieted the room with the commanding presence of a general, without the want or need for the title. “Gentlemen! Please!” The waves of clamor quieted instantly.

“Admiral,” the president said, his words sullen and low. “Does Gordon have the soil solution that you and Commander Luis’s team were working on?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

A collective sigh escaped the room, which refueled the barrage of blame and frustration. Every syllable that was thrown toward Frizen simply plunked off the front of his uniform and fell to the floor. Words in a time of war were about as useless as a bail bucket full of holes. In his experience, bullets were much more effective.

“Enough!” the president ordered, slamming his fists on the table, silencing the childish nonsense. “If it weren’t for Admiral Frizen’s actions, we wouldn’t have the upper hand on Gordon’s sentries.” The scolding was enough to shut the rest of the room down and the president gestured for Frizen to continue.

“As of right now, Commander Claire’s campaign in Wyoming has been successful. We believe that success to comprise two reasons: that area of the Coalition’s control wasn’t as densely populated, and we were able to catch them by surprise. Now that Gordon is aware of our strike, he’ll be quick to retaliate. Our strategy is to continue to have Commander Claire push southeast, while the Navy’s Atlantic fleet repositions itself in the Gulf, where we will retake the fishing villages of Louisiana and Mississippi and the oil refineries of Texas. Once we have a strong foothold on the coast, we will push north into Kansas, and our forces will meet in the middle, where we’ll take Topeka.”

“How many men, Admiral?” The president asked, his cheeks continuing their sullen dip into the sides of his face. “How many will we lose on both sides?”

“Our initial assessment is ten thousand, Mr. President. But because most of the Coalition sentries were former army and marines, we believe they’ll join us once the real fighting begins. However, there will still be significant support for Gordon as long as he’s able to keep the sentries fed.”

“General Mears,” the president said. “Do we have enough ground troops to combat the sentries at Gordon’s disposal?”

“The Coalition ground forces outnumber us three to one at the moment, Mr. President, but our Naval and Air Force support will give us the edge.”

“Let me make one thing clear, gentlemen. I don’t want us dropping bombs on civilians,” the president said. “Collateral damage must be minimal, and when this is over, I don’t want the American people to return to homes that were destroyed by the very military that was supposed to protect them.”

“Or course, Mr. President,” Mears answered. “The installations we’re targeting with our air support will be strictly military. We’ll be using a combined effort from our reserves and the Navy to squeeze the Coalition out of the local civilian populations, minimizing loss of life and infrastructural damage.”

“That’s something Gordon knows as well, sir,” Frizen replied. “He’ll use the oil refineries and the fishing villages as shields against our missiles. It will be crucial that the ground forces we have in those engagements understand the risk they’re facing.”

The United States’s first civil war spanned over four years and claimed the lives of over 620,000 soldiers. It was the bloodiest conflict in United States history. However, if Gordon felt cornered or threatened that everything he had would be taken away, then there was the very real possibility that he would resort to a scorched-earth policy, burning anything and everything in his control.

“Mr. President, every second spent waiting is one less we could be using to turn the tide in this conflict. We have our resources in place in the Gulf, and we’ll need you to authorize the use of force against American citizens,” Admiral Frizen said. “I understand the gravity of that decision, and the weight it will carry on you and everyone in this room. But we must act now.”

***

The lab was dark, distorting the outlines of the equipment inside into deformed shapes. Sydney, with all of his limbs curled into a ball with the exception of his left wrist, which was cuffed to the desk next to him, hadn’t closed his eyes since Gordon locked him up. His beady pupils roamed over the instruments of science forced under the shroud of darkness.

He wondered what Gordon would do to him if he wasn’t able to deliver the same soil solution Todd had created? What would happen to him if they couldn’t unlock the encrypted files Alex had stolen? Maybe Gordon would use him as a bargaining chip with his father, exchanging Sydney’s life for escape to another country, or immunity. But in the end, Gordon would most likely just kill him. That was the easiest and most popular way Gordon enjoyed tying up loose ends.

The door to the lab opened, and a flood of light blinded Sydney. He blinked repeatedly until he adjusted to the light, and he saw the grinning face of Jake towering above him.

“Rise and shine, asshole,” Jake said. “Time to go to work.”

Jake dropped a folded piece of paper in Sydney’s lap that had random letters and numbers scribbled on it. “What is this?”

“The password to Todd’s encrypted files,” Jake answered.

Sydney recoiled as Jake bent down and invaded the personal bubble Sydney had always preferred to keep between himself and other people. He could smell the coffee on Jake’s breath, and the leather of his jacket. Sydney’s body curled inward to avoid Jake’s presence until his spine wouldn’t allow it to collapse any further.

“Gordon wants you working on it now,” Jake said. “And I’ll be here watching you to make sure it’s done properly this time.”

Sydney felt the jiggle of his wrist as Jake unlocked the cuffs, and the tension in the small bones of his wrist was released. He rubbed the tender, bruised flesh and stumbled to his desk. The password on the paper was surrounded by faded, red blotches placed sporadically around the numbers and letters. He stopped typing and looked up to Jake, who was watching him like a hawk. The more Sydney stared at those blotches on the paper, the more he realized what his fate would be if he failed.

Ever since Sydney’s first discovery of Todd Penn, he’d known the man was a genius. He’d done what Sydney and no other scientist in the world was able to accomplish, and he did it in an underground lab in the middle of nowhere. It was a remarkable feat of science and ingenuity. If this invention had come about three years ago, or even right after the soil crisis started, Todd’s name would have been in every science publication around the world. He would have been a household name, a savior of the people. But he wasn’t. No one would ever know his name or see his face. The only thing that was going to be left of Todd Penn were the dried blotches of blood on a crinkled piece of paper. Sydney was holding all that was left of a great mind. “Did you kill him?”

“What’s the matter? Feeling sorry for the guy?” Jake asked.

A tear escaped from the corner of Sydney’s eye, and he quickly wiped it away before Jake noticed. But he couldn’t hide the trembling in his thin arms and legs underneath the lab coat. A slow, internal struggle of morality raged inside him. Everything he’d stood for as a scientist, the idea that the pursuit of knowledge was the highest form of morality and those who prohibited it were crusaders of death, was begging him to stop his work. He wanted to run, he wanted to hide, and he didn’t want to be here.

“Hey!” Jake snapped. “Let’s get to work. Gordon wants all of this done yesterday, so let’s move it!”

“No.” The word came out in a mouse-like squeak, almost too quiet for even Sydney to hear himself. His fingers stopped entering the code, and he crumpled the bloodstained piece of paper in his tiny fist. Despite his rebellious act, Sydney kept his head down, afraid that looking Jake in the eyes would make the repercussions of his actions real.

Jake leaned his chest into Sydney’s shoulder, and Sydney could feel Jake’s hot breath on the side of his face. “Enter the code.”

“I won’t help Gordon anymore,” Sydney replied, the lump in his throat catching slightly as he spoke.

Jake grabbed Sydney by the collar and easily lifted all of Sydney’s 120 pounds into the air and slammed him up against the wall. Jake’s jaw was clenched tight, and his words escaped from the thin spaces in his teeth. “We don’t have the fucking time or patience to deal with your little moral crisis, so I’m going to make this simple. If you don’t get off your ass and compile the solution that’s on this file, I’m going to kill you.”

“No, you won’t,” Sydney answered, his shaky voice escaping through panicked breaths.

“And why the fuck not?”

“Because I’m one of the only scientists you have left who could figure out the organic code sequences Todd put together in that data.”

Jake let go of Sydney’s collar, and Sydney collapsed to the floor. Jake towered over him, the side of his jacket swinging open, exposing the gun and holster underneath. “Yeah, you might be right about that.”

A wave of relief washed over Sydney. He wiped the sweat on his forehead, his fingers trembling, and his body shook in spasms of dwindling adrenaline. But the quick moment of safety was swiftly dispelled when Jake pulled a pocketknife.

“But you don’t need your balls to do your job.”

Sydney scrambled on all fours in an attempted escape, but Jake pounced on him, squishing him into the floor. He squirmed to break free, but Jake was just too heavy. Jake pressed the flat end of the blade against Sydney’s right cheek. The cold steel caused Sydney to end his struggle.

“Now, you have two options right now. Option one, I cut your balls off then have a doctor sew you up, and then you can work on getting this solution done. Option two, you keep your balls and start the project now. What’s it gonna be?”

“Okay,” Sydney said, his voice muffled from his face being smooshed into the floor.

“Okay you wanna keep your balls? Or okay you don’t want to keep them?”

“I want to keep them.”

“Good boy.”

***

The crude map of drawn lines projected on the wall of Gordon’s conference room, which had turned into the Coalition’s war room, was the very best artistic effort of his Chief of Sentries, Dean Grout. And despite that best effort, Dean did little more than what a fifth grader could accomplish on a homework assignment of similar scope.

“They took us by surprise in Wyoming, but their advances have slowed now that they’re pushing into Oklahoma,” Dean said. “However, we’re going to be hard pressed on both sides. We’ve received confirmation that the Navy’s Atlantic fleet has finally made its way into the Gulf.”

“They won’t risk using their ordinance as long as our sentries are intermixed with civilians,” Gordon said. “We’ve got our human shields, let’s use them goddammit!” Gordon accentuated the point with his fist slamming into the table. The only other attendee allowed in the meeting besides Dean and Gordon was Jake. The lack of competence through the rest of the Coalition was too frustrating to deal with.

“That’s what I’ve ordered our men to do,” Dean said, folding his arms together, signaling the end of his less-than-stellar presentation.

“What do you want to do about sentry placement?” Jake asked.

“I want the majority of our men on the western front. That’s where they’ll send the bulk of their troops in from California. And we use the same strategy at the oil refineries as we do at the fishing villages. Make them come to us.”

“Yes, sir.” Dean packed up the rest of his things and left.

Gordon looked at the map of his Coalition. With the force of the entire military now plotting against him, he wasn’t sure how long those lines would stay in place.

“We might have a little bit of a problem,” Jake said.

Gordon let out an exhaustive sigh. “What is it?”

“Our lab rat is less than cooperative. I’ve given him some motivation to continue the work, but I don’t know how much longer that’s going to last.”

“Once the process is done, we’ll be able to replicate it without his help, but until I’m holding that fucking solution in my bare hands, I want you with him constantly. Got it?”

“Yeah, I got it.” Jake pointed to the door where Dean exited. “You know he didn’t tell you about the deserters, right?”

“I know.”

“That’s going to be a problem, Gordon. You knew that from the beginning. Once a jarhead, always a jarhead. Their motto isn’t Semper Fi for nothing.”

“One problem at a time.”

Jake nodded and left. Gordon knew he was right. The code of duty and honor was programmed and hardwired into their brains. He knew some of them would stay, but when the tide started to turn, they’d all run to their beloved army.

Gordon needed an alternative. He locked the door to his office and made sure his secretary understood that he wasn’t to be disturbed for the next hour. He drew the blinds to his window and pulled out his personal laptop. A few minutes later an Asian gentleman appeared on the screen. His jet-black hair was meticulously combed, and the tailored cut of his suit exuded extravagance.

“Mr. Reath, so good of you to call.”

“Yes, it was.”

The man’s face twisted in the faint hint of disgust, which he quickly dispelled with a weak smile. “Your war seems to be heating up. The rest of the international community is very intrigued on how everything will play out.”

“I’m sure they are. Have you given some thought to our last discussion?”

“I have.”

The man went silent. “And?” Gordon asked.

“And it is a very large risk for my country.”

“Sheng, what I’m offering you, the current president can’t. You’ve seen the balance sheet. The United States owes you trillions. This famine pushed the country’s debt over the edge. I know you’ve been putting pressure on the president over the past year, and what has he given you?”

“Any troops offered to your cause will be considered an act of war by the American government, and despite the debt, I’m not comfortable approving such a drastic move.”

“Sheng, it’s now or never. I am guaranteeing you not just the soil solution, but also a down payment on what the American government owes you once I’m in control, and those payments will continue. We can usher in a new alliance that would reshape the rest of the world. Imagine what we could do.”

“From what my intelligence officers have told me, you’ve taken a beating on the western front, already losing Wyoming. How do you expect to stop them, Gordon?”

Gordon thought the prospect of crushing the former world power that was the United States would be enough to sway Sheng’s decision. But the red, white, and blue’s military prowess was still enough to keep the debt collectors at bay.

“If you can take back the ground you’ve lost, I’ll provide you the military support you seek. And I’ll do so openly,” Sheng said.

“I appreciate the opportunity, Mr. President.”

The video call ended, and Gordon slammed the laptop shut. The odds of taking back Wyoming were slim. Gordon’s timeline was shrinking. He needed Sydney to finish the soil solution. There wouldn’t be a single country in the world that wouldn’t protect him for that type of data. It was revolutionary, Sheng knew that, but Sheng also knew that the easiest way to lower the price was to increase Gordon’s desperation.

China was Gordon’s only hope for any military assistance. Europe wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole, and South America had a collective army that the state of Texas could take out single-handedly. Sheng was playing it smart, and because of that Gordon would have to change the way he was going to get out of this alive.

Chapter 3

Alex shed his bloodied clothes and changed into something that was less Halloween and more Saturday afternoon. He eyeballed the shower but knew there wasn’t enough time. And his recent actions had led him to a subconscious, self-inflicting punishment of denial. I don’t deserve it.

Packing was simple, since his only possessions were the clothes he had on his back and the sack of materials the sentries had dropped off the day before from his stay in Wyoming. Among those belongings were a pair of clothes and the book Todd had meant to give him the day Gordon showed up. The collection of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories was a gift he never should have received. He stuffed it back into his sack and slung it over his shoulder.

Alex did one final scan of the house, making sure there wasn’t anything useful that was left behind, when he came across Meeko’s room. The door was cracked open slightly, and Alex could hear the faint sobs coming from inside. He gently pushed the door open, and Meeko was sitting on his bed with the laptop he used to communicate with Alex when he was in Wyoming.

The boy looked up at him with tear-streaked eyes and started sobbing even harder. Alex set his gear down and embraced the boy in a hug.

“I’m sorry,” Meeko cried, burying his face into Alex’s shoulder.

Alex cradled the back of the boy’s head. “Sorry for what?”

“It was my fault you left. It was my fault you had to go away. I’m s-sorry, Alex. It’s m-my fault.”

All the self-pity bullshit Alex had wallowed in over the past twenty-four hours completely disappeared. Of all the things for Meeko to tell him, of all the reasons for the boy to be upset, he chose the fact that he thought he’d let Alex down. Alex peeled Meeko off his shoulder so he could look the boy in the eye when he spoke to him. “You listen to me. None of this, and I mean absolutely none, is your fault. So whatever you’re beating yourself up for ends right now.” Meeko nodded, and Alex wiped his thumb under Meeko’s left eye, removing a tear and leaving a brown smudge from the filth on his hands. He picked up the laptop from Meeko’s lap and flipped it over in his hands.

“I wanted to keep it,” Meeko said, sniffling and wiping his nose with his shirt sleeve. “I may not get the chance to ever have one again. I thought they were going to come and take it from me, but after last night…” Meeko trailed off. Alex handed it back to him, and the boy gave a slight smile.

“We’re leaving in a few minutes, so make sure you have everything you need,” Alex said then kissed the top of Meeko’s head.

“Alex!”

Alex jumped from the bed and ran to the front door, where Harper almost keeled over from the sprint up the hill. “What’s wrong?” Alex asked.

“The radio… Sentries are coming…”

“Meeko, head down to the trucks now!”

Meeko rushed past him and pumped his little legs as hard as they would go. Alex wasn’t far behind, helping Harper back down the hill where the rest of the community members waited for Alex’s instructions. A quiet look of panic had spread. The wide eyes, slack jaws, and twitching fingers expelled the nervous energy.

Alex jogged over to the front gate. It was wide enough for two sentry vehicles to pass through at the same time. He turned around, looking at the point of view from the entrance down Main Street. Once the sentries came through, they’d most likely spread out to the housing unit, vehicle hangar, and meal station.

The water station provided a clear line of sight to Main Street’s entrance, and the thick stone walls surrounding the well provided good protection for at least two men to provide blanket cover fire. The factory was adjacent to the front gate on the left-hand side and extended out past the front gate. A few dirty windows lined the back, where he and another three or four with rifles could post up in an advantageous area. If Alex could cut the convoy entering in half, then Main Street would act as a perfect ambush location.

Alex pulled Harper from the crowd and off to the side. He kept his voice low so the others couldn’t hear. “Did they give a count of how many were coming?”

The sweat from Harper’s face flung off his cheeks as he shook his head. “No.”

“What about their location? How far out are they?”

“Ten miles.”

Including Alex, there were thirty-eight members in the community. If it was just one unit, then there would be twelve sentries in four vehicles, which was manageable. If it was anything more than that, they’d become overrun. 

“All right, everyone! Listen up!” Alex said.

The crowd’s roar of whispers ended, and they gathered around Alex. Their frail bodies bumped into one another, bony shoulders poking their neighbors, trying not to let the fear and apprehension show in the slight spasms of nervous energy.

“Sentries are headed our way. We don’t know how many are going to show up, but the moment they find out what happened to their partners, we’re going to be in trouble. Who here knows how to handle a weapon?”

A total of eleven arms went up, two of which were the shy, timid hands of Donna and Mike. Donna was older, in her late fifties, with terrible cataracts. If she stayed, she wouldn’t be able to hit the dirt underneath her feet. Mike was around the same age but with terrible arthritis. Alex wasn’t even sure if he could squeeze the trigger.

Alex walked over and handed Donna the AR-15 rifle. “Do you know how to use this?” She shook her head. “All right, well, it’s easy enough. In fact”—Alex took a few steps back and waved his hands, motioning everyone to gather around—“I want everyone to see this!”

Alex ejected the magazine and pulled the charging handle back to eject the round still in the chamber. He double-checked to make sure it was empty then grabbed an empty magazine for the demonstration. “Listen up! Anyone who has never handled this type of weapon before, I want you to pay close attention, because we’re only going to have time to do this once, and if those of us who are staying behind can’t fend off the sentries who are coming, you’ll need to know how to use this.”

It wasn’t the most tactful speech he’d ever given, but time was of the essence. There wasn’t room for mollycoddling anymore. If you didn’t know how to protect yourself, you would die.

“Rule number one, you don’t aim at anything you don’t plan on killing. Rule number two, you keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to squeeze it. When you hold the rifle, keep the stock snug against your shoulder and do NOT put your eye against the scope.” He flipped the rifle to its side, exposing the safety lever and the magazine ejector button. “Make sure your safety is off, and once you’re out of ammo, this slide here will open up and expose the chamber like this,” Alex again pulled the charging handle back so they could see. “Push this button here, and it will eject the magazine, then when you put in a new one, shove it in until you hear it click. This will snap the charging handle back into place, and you’re ready to fire. If the gun jams, try pushing this button here, which will push any rounds that are stuck forward.”

Each face studied the rifle with anxious eyes. Alex handed the rifle to Donna, who held took it awkwardly at first but then carried it at her side, where she looked more comfortable.

Alex bent down to Meeko’s level and placed both hands around the boy’s shoulders. “I need you to help me out, okay, punk?” Meeko nodded quickly, trying to hide the nervousness his eyes betrayed. “It’s your job to take everyone who’s not staying as deep into the woods as you can. Do you remember that river I showed you when you first came here?” Alex asked.

“Yeah, I think so,” Meeko answered.

“Well, that’s where I want you to go.”

Meeko gave a firmer nod, and Alex ruffled the mess of curls on his head.

“All right,” Alex said. “Mike and Donna, you two take a duffel bag of rifles and ammo. If we can’t hold the sentries off, then the woods will be the first place they search, but you should have a nice head start.”

The lump in Donna’s throat caught when she gave a whispered, “Okay,” and Mike wouldn’t stop massaging his hands. After some quick rearranging, the truck was loaded down with enough food and water to last everyone in the group at least six days, which would at least get them into southern Wyoming. 

Before Donna left, Alex pulled her aside. “Meeko will know where to go. Just follow him, okay?” Alex could see the slight tremor that vibrated her entire body as she nodded. Alex placed his hand on her shoulder, and he felt the tremors ease. “If one of us doesn’t come and find you in the next hour, then you take everyone northwest. Wyoming should be clear of sentries, but you have to get there as quickly as possible.”

Donna nodded, adjusting the rifle in her arms, then started her trek up to the forest with the rest of the community members. Meeko was the last one to leave, and only after he wrapped his arms around Alex’s waist and squeezed as hard as he could. Alex felt the boy’s wet face soak his shirt. He picked Meeko up and returned the hug.

“I’ll see you soon,” Alex said then set Meeko down and watched the boy catch up to the other community members heading toward the forest. Alex waited a moment before addressing those who stayed behind. If things turned south, then this was the last time he would see the boy.

The nine thin faces waiting on Alex were the only things separating the invading sentries and keeping the rest of the community alive. Harper, whom Alex was pretty sure lied about using a weapon, was stationed at the factory and given an AR-15 along with six fully loaded magazines of ammo, Kevlar, and grenades.

Joining Harper in the factory were Chris, Lilly, and Iris, who had the same gear. Alex instructed the four of them to remain quiet and unseen until the firing started. Jimmy, Frank, and Jean would be joining Alex at the front gate, dressed in sentry uniforms to greet their unwanted guests. Luckily, there were enough spare uniforms for them not to have to peel any off the dead sentries Alex had killed the night before.

Mick and Connor were the only other individuals in the group who had any expert background in handling a weapon. Connor did a stint in the Marines twenty years ago, and Mick had spent most of his youth hunting, so Alex stationed the two of them behind the well, wielding two sniper rifles and enough ammo for them to camp there all day.

Harper parked one of the sentry trucks in the pathway of the community’s gate, narrowing the funnel for the sentries to enter. From there, Alex could disable one of the vehicles, cutting the caravan in half and trapping them in a kill box, where they’d be surrounded. Alex popped the hood and dumped a smoke grenade into the engine to add to the ruse. The bigger the distraction, the easier it would be to get the first two cars to stop.

With the truck in position and everyone armed, Alex did one final run-through. “All right, everyone, let’s do a quick communication check to make sure we’re all on the same frequency. Check one.”

Everyone gave a thumbs-up with a verbal “copy” so Alex could make sure he could hear everyone else. “Good,” he said. “No matter how many trucks arrive, I’m only letting in two. Once those first two enter, I’ll disable the third with a grenade to block the rest of the front entrance. Harper, Lilly, Chris, Iris, that’s when you four open fire from the factory windows on anyone who is still outside. Got it?”

Alex received a volley of nervous nods and shaky okays. “Mick and Connor, once the grenade goes off, you open fire on any sentry trapped on Main Street. They’ll use their trucks as cover, so make sure you concentrate fire on the windows. That’ll be the weak point. Jimmy, Frank, Jean, and I will move to the sentry housing for cover, giving you two a clear line of sight. Our biggest advantage right now, no matter how many sentries show up, will be our element of surprise. If things turn south, then I want everyone to hightail it to the forest and meet up with the others. If we do our job right, then the remaining sentries won’t have the resources to try and follow.”

The air was thick with nerves. Alex knew that uncertainty was the most dangerous of parasites. It would drain you physically and mentally, until there wasn’t anything left. And with every second that passed, the parasite grew, turning the fears in your head into unbeatable, monstrous titans.

“I know everyone here understands what we’re up against,” Alex said. “But if we stick to the plan, we will make it out of here alive. The world is changing. The Coalition is on its heels. Now, let’s do what we have to and be done with it.”

The group dispersed, and Alex hustled up to the front gate with a pair of binoculars. He scanned the rolling hills until he came across a caravan kicking up dust and heading their way.

Alex popped another smoke grenade into the engine of the truck, which forced the gray plume higher into the blue Kansas sky. And almost on cue, the sentry’s radio at the front station blew static, which was immediately replaced by a panic-stricken Class 2 on the other end. “Community 0183, we’re seeing a lot of smoke coming from your location. What’s going on over there?”

Alex picked up the receiver, took a breath, and then pressed the side button to speak. “Copy that. We ran into some engine trouble on one of our perimeter checks this morning after roll call. We managed to make it back to the gate before it started smoking.”

“Roger that, 0183. We have a few mechanics with us who can take a look at it.”

“Much appreciated.”

Alex set the receiver down and flicked the safety lever off the AR-15. His fingers tapped the grooves of the replacement magazines and counted the four grenades around his belt. Alex rotated his right shoulder, shifting the Kevlar and rifle strap. Alex noticed Jimmy’s white-knuckled grip on the rifle in his hands. “Hey,” Alex said. Jimmy quickly diverted his gaze from the fields to Alex. “We’ll make it.”

A drip of sweat rolled off the tip of Jimmy’s nose as he gave a nervous nod. Alex clicked his radio on. “The caravan heading our way is eight vehicles strong, so the plan stays as is. The third truck that comes in will be our road block. Mick and Connor, once that grenade goes off, you need to lay down as much fire as you can.”

“Copy that, Alex,” Mick said.

Jean and Frank fidgeted awkwardly in their sentry uniforms at the housing entrance. It was odd to see them dressed in the uniforms they had loathed for so long. And, once again, Alex found himself playing the part of operative, cloaked under a shroud of deceit but free of the hesitation and regret that plagued him before.

Regardless, the nerves of war were still present. Alex noticed the whiteness of his own knuckles and eased his grip. A stiff wind blew the smoke barreling from the truck’s engine into Alex’s face, briefly blinding and choking him until it changed direction. When the smoke finally cleared, the first truck came to a stop at the front gate.

Per protocol, the Class 2 rode in the first truck. The trucks, along with the faces inside, were covered in dust and blood. The sentries had already seen action, which meant they were probably low on ammo. The Class 2 nodded to the disabled vehicle at the entrance. “You guys know what happened to it?”

Images from the night before flashed in Alex’s mind. The sentries’ dead bodies, covered in blood. That distinct smell of sweat and copper wasn’t something he was ever going to be able to get rid of.

“Hey,” the Class 2 said, “you all right?”

Alex snapped out of his stupor. “Yeah. I’m fine.” Alex motioned over to the sentry housing where Frank, Jean, and Jimmy stood sheepishly by the door. “Our vehicle hangar’s full right now, but you can have your men park just along Main Street.”

The Class 2 nodded and unknowingly pulled into the death trap waiting for him. The trucks were lined ten feet apart, and Alex pulled off one of the grenades from his belt and concealed it in his fist as the second truck rolled through. Alex drummed his fingers nervously on the side of the grenade. Eight feet. He could see the eyes of the sentry driving the third truck lock on him. Five feet. The driver squinted at him, a look of realization on his face as Alex realized he’d seen that sentry before. Three feet. The driver slowed down still a few feet away, but before he could stop completely, Alex released his grip on the grenade, triggering the firing mechanism, and tossed it under the belly of the vehicle and sprinted to the cover of the housing station.

The heat from the explosion cooked Alex’s back as the undercarriage of the truck erupted, sending shrapnel into the arteries of every sentry’s legs inside. The truck’s axles collapsed and disabled the vehicle, blocking the rest of the entrance and leaving the injured sentries inside to bleed out in the smoldering wreckage.

The first two trucks that had already entered slammed on the brakes, and the sentries inside poured out of the trucks to look at the mangled steel behind them. On cue, Mick and Connor opened fire.

Alex, Jean, Frank, and Jimmy concentrated fire on the second truck, which managed to accelerate quickly enough to evade Mick and Connor’s line of fire and sped across the street by the factory. Alex pressed his hand to his left ear, attempting to drown out the gunfire that thundered around him, and used his right hand to link up his radio. “Harper! The second truck is using the factory as cover! Have Chris smoke them out!”

“What?” Harper radioed. “Alex, I can’t hear you. What’s happening over there?”

The AR-15s ejected their hot shells in rhythm with the thump, thump, thump of gunshots. The gunfire next to Alex, combined with the shots echoing over the radio, blended together in orchestrated chaos. Before Alex could repeat himself, the window next to where he was crouched shattered, and Jimmy was propelled backward.

Jimmy gulped massive breaths of air. The round hit him right in the chest, but the Kevlar made sure a bruised sternum was the worst of the injury. Alex dragged him to the back, away from the gunfire.

“Alex!” Frank said, struggling to replace a new magazine into his rifle. “It’s stuck!”

Alex ducked low and crawled along the side wall, back to the front of the building. The sentries were starting to gain some momentum in their return fire, and they redecorated the inside of the sentry housing station with bullet holes.

Continual static kept rushing into Alex’s ear. He repeatedly pressed the receiver on his radio, screaming the same message over and over. “Harper! Can you hear me? Harper!”

The answer was piercing screams, and after reloading Frank’s rifle, Harper’s voice finally came through, “The sentries are circling around back!”

“How many trucks?” Alex asked.

“Three!”

Glass, shell casings, and dirt scraped against Alex’s arms and legs as he slid on his belly to the open door and peeked around the edge to get a good look at the situation outside. The sentries had regrouped by the factory’s entrance, positioning themselves in a stronghold of defense. Once the three trucks flanked Mick and Connor from the rear, they’d be overrun.

“Frank! Jean!” Alex yelled. “I’m going to back up Mick and Connor. I need you two to cover me.”

Alex crouched low at the door, poised to sprint to the well the moment Jean and Frank opened fire. “Mick, Connor, I’m coming to you!” Alex held up his hand and counted down from five. The moment he hit one, Frank and Jean blanketed Main Street with every single bullet that remained in their magazines.

Sprays of gray ash kicked up behind Alex with each step forward as he dashed down Main Street, bullets whizzing behind him. Adrenaline coursed through his veins, blocking any type of pain from his senses. He couldn’t feel the impact of his feet on the ground, or the heavy Kevlar around his body, or the rifle on his back. The only feeling was the deep thump in his chest, pumping every bit of life and energy he had left into getting to that well.

Alex dove in one final leap, crashing into the dirt next to Mick and Connor. The crack and thunder of their rifles boomed in Alex’s ear. He wedged himself right next to Connor. The well was barely wide enough for the three of them.

“I need one of your rifles, now!” Alex said. Connor exchanged his sniper rifle with the AR-15 that Alex carried. The powerful fifty-caliber rifle was the only thing they had that could pierce the sentry’s truck armor. “Where’s the ammo?”

“Left pants pocket!” Connor screamed, his face vibrating from the rifle’s recoil.

Alex clutched the ammo to his chest, which rose and fell heavily as he caught his breath. He smacked both Connor and Mick to grab their attention over the thunderstorm of gunshots. “If I can’t keep the trucks from flanking us, then you grab everyone and head for the forest.”

Alex closed his eyes, took a few quick, short breaths then sprinted to the end of Main Street, lugging the fifty-caliber rifle with him, where the advancing sentries would have to come through to flank them. A wave of gray ash flew into the air as Alex crashed to the ground, landing knee first. He immediately scoured the hills, looking for the enemy. He clicked his radio on. “Harper, anyone wounded on your end?”

“Iris got hit in the arm, but she’s alive. They have us pinned in the back of the factory.”

“Do not let them get past you, Harper, you hear me? I don’t care what you have to do. Jean, Frank, see if you can push your way to the factory for reinforcement. Mick and Connor, you two provide cover for Jean and Frank on their run.”

A series of “copy that” flooded Alex’s ear. He loaded the massive shells of ammo into the rifle and wriggled his belly on the gray ash, positioning himself for the hell heading his way. The first two trucks popped over the hill and into his crosshairs, but he couldn’t locate the third vehicle. The truck to the left bounced and shifted from the sentry’s sporadic driving and hilly terrain.

The recoil from the rifle sent a shock wave that rippled from his shoulder all the way down to his spine. The first shot went wide right. Alex cursed under his breath as the shell ejected and another bullet entered the chamber. The lack of food and continued fatigue triggered unwanted spasms in the muscles along his right shoulder and arm. A slight tremor hit his trigger finger as he realigned his shot. His whole body felt like it was falling apart.

Another shot recoiled the force of the rifle into Alex’s shoulder, causing him to wince from the pain that hit him. This time, the bullet penetrated the front windshield, killing the driver instantly and careening the sentry’s truck out of control. When Alex lined up another shot to the second truck, machine gun fire erupted behind him, and the radio waves echoed the same repetitive screams. “Alex!”

The two armored trucks that blocked the front gate were immediately rammed and shoved out of the way by the third armored truck that was supposed to be flanking them from the rear.

“Mick! Connor! Concentrate fire on that truck, now!” Alex radioed.

The second sentry truck grew closer. The ground around Alex erupted in sprays of gray ash. The sentries’ aim was getting better. Alex reloaded. The front bumper of the truck bounced into view then quickly disappeared from the scope. Another cluster of bullets hit the ground next to him, this time close enough for the dirt they kicked up to splash on the back of Alex’s leg.

Each time a different piece of the truck would come into view he squeezed the trigger, sending the massive rounds into the hood, grill, door, and front windshield, but failing to stop the speeding freight train heading right for him. No more time. Alex lifted the rifle and sprinted to the closest building on Main Street for cover, with bullets vibrating the air around his ears.

The moment his legs disappeared into the meal station’s entrance, six bullet holes decorated the doorframe, splintering the worn pieces of wood.

“Mick, Connor, you’re about to have company,” Alex said, trying to reposition himself at the meal station’s window.

“No shit!” Mick answered.

Alex shoved the barrel of the rifle through the window, shattering and scraping the glass aside from the panels and exposed himself to the chaos outside. Mick and Connor managed to seek cover on the far side of the well as the truck joined its comrades in corralling the wagons by the factory’s entrance, creating a barrier of armor.

With the amount of time the sentries had after the first grenade explosion, Alex knew they would have radioed for assistance by now, and it wouldn’t be long until reinforcements arrived. Once that happened, the community would be overrun with sentries.

“Jean, Frank, you guys fall back to the sentry housing. Mick, Connor, meet me over in the meal station. I’ll lay down cover fire for your run,” Alex said.

Each boom from the powerful rifle rattled the entire front wall of the building, sending shards of glass hanging from the edges of the window panels crashing to the ground. When Mick and Connor finally made it inside, they performed a weapons check.

“How many magazines do you have left?” Alex asked.

“Two,” Mick answered.

“Three,” Connor replied.

“Harper, what’s your position?”

All of their radios were linked to the same frequency, exposing everyone to the screams and gunshots each of them experienced firsthand.

“We’re pinned down in the back!” Harper answered, cutting his voice off with a few quick gunshots. “More of them showed up. I don’t know how much longer we’re going to last over here!”

“Just dig in for a little longer,” Alex replied.

The looks on Mick and Connor’s faces mirrored what Alex already knew. If they didn’t make a move, then Harper and the rest of them in the factory wouldn’t last the next three minutes.

Mick tossed Alex one of the AR-15s, and Connor stuffed his belt with his remaining magazines. The sniper rifle was too big to shoot while carrying, and Alex knew he couldn’t afford leaving anyone behind to operate it. With the numbers now even on both sides, the first group to make an advance would have the upper hand. “Frank, Jean, how’s Jimmy?”

“He’s a little wobbly, but other than that he’s fine,” Frank answered.

“Well, tell him to shake it off and give him a rifle. We’re going to get Harper out.”

The brief silence that followed was filled with all the flashes of a man who had accepted that his life was drawing near. Finally, Jean spoke up. “What’s the plan?”

“There should still be some grenades in the back of the sentry house where we found the rifles,” Alex answered. “Grab as many as you can. Make it quick.”

Throughout the entire fight, Alex could feel his shoulder burning. What started as a minor discomfort had transformed into a debilitating stressor. The fires that disfigured his flesh years ago had left a mark on him that he’d never been able to shake off. It didn’t matter what he tried to do or who he helped, the fire that lingered on his shoulder always asked for more. And now, it was calling for one final price. It was calling for his blood. All he had to do was answer the door, and it would be over. This was it.

The radio in Alex’s ear crackled, and Jean’s voice broke through. “Alex! I’ve got them!”

“All right. You guys are close enough to get the grenades within a few feet of the trucks. I want you to throw all of them, and the moment they detonate, you send a smoke canister to give us some cover while Mick, Connor, and I make a run for the factory. You two provide cover fire for us until we make it to the trucks, then you come out and join us. We take them together. Everyone got it?”

“Yeah,” Frank answered. “Yup,” Jean replied.

Mick and Connor were already at the door when Alex joined them in position. The sentries’ gunfire echoed on Main Street until Jean and Frank rocked the earth around them with the percussive explosions of the grenades.

Plumes of gray ash and debris mushroomed into the air and rained down on the trucks already covered with bullet holes and blood. The explosions rocked the armored trucks, blasting through the thick metal-plated doors, twisting the metal into shreds, and sending whatever glass was left in the windows flying through the air.

Alex peeked around the door to watch the final crescendo of grenades climax into a spectacular array of white flashes sprinkled with bits of gray. The craters in the earth around the trucks grew with every compression that rearranged the orderly particles into nothing but chaotic carnage. And after the final blast, Alex’s ears were ringing, and Main Street fell into the only silence it’d seen for the past ten minutes.

The moment Alex saw the smoke canister eject its yellow shroud, the sole of his boot scraped against the worn concrete surface of the meal station as he sprinted toward his judgment. The scent of the acrid smoke filled his nose and lungs and burned his eyes.

Fully dressed in the sentry uniform, with the smoke around him, and the imaginary flames still licking his shoulder, Alex couldn’t help but feel that he’d lived this moment before. It was almost as if he were stuck in this loop, perpetually going round and round, but now the wheel was finally coming to a stop.

They squatted low behind the wrecked metal of one of the cars in the massive divots left by the grenades and kept quiet, trying not to give away their position. Alex pointed to the other truck across from them and motioned for Mick and Connor to advance. They kept their bodies hunched over, with their rifles still snug against their shoulder, and once they made it to the other truck, Alex could barely see them through the thick smoke circling them.

A few rapid footsteps against the dirt caused Alex to quickly aim his rifle when Jean and Frank came into view. Frank landed against the side of the truck a little too hard, and after the loud thump of his shoulder echoed into the smoky air, the brief lull in gunfire ended.

“Harper, we’re out front!” Alex radioed. “Give them everything you’ve got!”

Alex marched forward through the clusters of low-lying yellow clouds, giving him less than a foot of visibility. The flash of a gun barrel gave the first sentry away, and Alex fired. Three thumps and a loud groan followed, but the moment he opened fired he revealed his position, and he felt the hammer of a bullet collide into his chest, and his legs kicked out from under him. His face reddened to a purple hue as the strain from the gunshot left him choking on the ground.

More gunfire and shouts from the sentries pierced through the smoke, and Alex could hear his own people begin to scream. “Alex! We’re hit! Alex! Alex!” All the voices blended together in the same high-pitched scream of fear.

The boots of a sentry suddenly appeared. Alex lifted his rifle and fired four rounds into the enemy’s chest. Alex scrambled to his feet and managed to bring a shaky crosshair into the center of the sentry’s face, which caved inward from the 5.56 piece of lead that Alex buried deep within his skull.

“Alex!”

“Harper?” Alex asked. “Harper, are you all right?”

Alex used the tip of the rifle as a point of focus, scanning through the smoke for the familiar face. But instead, he saw two black sentry helmets contrasted against the yellow fumes. Alex fired two bullets into one of the sentries’ legs before the second tackled him to the ground.

The collision loosened Alex’s grip on his rifle, and the gray ash did little to soften the blow on his spine from the two-hundred-pound sentry on top of him. Alex sucked in air, struggling to gain the upper hand on the sentry pinning him down.

The sentry reached for his sidearm, and Alex grabbed the sentry’s wrist. The sweat from battle had caused Alex’s fingers to run slick, and he could feel his grip slipping. The pistol jerked a few inches closer to Alex’s face before he was able to regain the grip he’d lost.

Alex’s face reddened. Drips of sweat rolled off the tip of the sentry’s nose and onto Alex’s chest. Jaws clenched, muscles ached, the struggle to survive raged between the two men. More cries sounded through Alex’s earpiece. Iris and Chris had been hit. The desperate screams from Harper, Frank, and Jean, begging for Alex to come help them, were silenced with the echo of gunshots.

The barrel of the pistol was aimed just outside of Alex’s left ear now. Only centimeters stood between life and death. The ghost-white tips of Alex’s fingers pressed into the sentry’s arm were the only things that stood between Alex and finality. His strength was almost gone. Just a few more seconds. That was all he had left.

Finally, he felt the slip of his fingertips and watched the barrel swing right above his left eye. Time seemed to freeze in that moment, staring into the black hole that was the 9mm pistol aimed to kill him. A white flash followed by darkness, that’s all that waited for him now.

Just before the white flash of the barrel that ejected the bullet from the chamber, an earth-shattering blast rocked the very ground where Alex waited for his eternity. Both the bullet and the sentry were knocked off kilter, and Alex used the moment to knock the sentry off him. Both the gunshot and the explosion that had just saved his life left a high-pitched whine in his ears that froze him in pain.

Alex could feel the rawness in his throat as the soundless screams vibrated his neck but failed to penetrate the piercing whine still lingering in his ears as another blast, more powerful than the one before, caused the sentry housing building to transform into a pile of splinters. He instinctively reached for the rifle, and while the sentry behind was still bumbling from the blasts, Alex shoved the rifle’s barrel into the sentry’s eye and blasted a hole that soaked the two of them in blood.

Alex turned in half circles, his feet twisting underneath him as he looked for any of his people, anyone that might still be alive. The yellow smoke had been replaced by the white smoke of fires breaking out at the front gate and the sentry housing. Suddenly, he remembered the radio piece in his right ear, and he could hear the delicate cries of someone over the radio.

“Alex, it’s Iris!”

“Iris?” Alex coughed. “Where are you?”

“Still in the factory, in the back room. There’s a—”

But before Iris had time to explain, Alex watched the tracks of a tank crawl over the wreckage of what was left of the front gate. It crushed the two armored trucks, turning both of them into metal pancakes. Accompanied to the left and right of the tank were soldiers, dressed not in the black uniforms of the Coalition, but of the United States military.

Two of them ran over to Alex, their rifles pointed at him. “Drop the weapon! Put your hands in the air!”

Alex uncurled his fingers from the rifle, and it fell to the ground. The soldiers patted him down, confiscating the magazines, knives, and grenades on Alex’s person. Once the pat down was complete, they cuffed Alex’s hand.

“What are you doing?” Alex asked, starting to resist and straining against the two soldiers. Alex looked down at his chest, and the black sentry uniform stared back at him. “Wait! No! I’m not a sentry! Check the database! My name is Alex! Alex Grives!”

“Stop!”

The booming voice of authority caused both soldiers to come to an immediate halt and sent a chill up Alex’s spine. It was a voice accompanied by a stout figure with a few days’ stubble along his square jaw.

“You’re Alex Grives?” the man asked, with no additional inflection in his voice to tell Alex what type of news his name would bring.

“Yes,” Alex said.

The affirmation was a quick right hook to Alex’s cheek that knocked him out of the grips of the two soldiers restraining him. The residual pain left Alex rolling on his side, unable to push himself off the ground due to the handcuffs. The imprint of the man’s fist was firmly in place on Alex’s cheek.

“Uncuff him,” the man said.

“Sir?”

“Do it!”

The release of Alex’s hands brought little relief to the pain still reeling in his head. Alex pushed himself off the ground, wobbling on two legs.

“Do you know who I am?” the man asked.

Alex shook his head.

The air in Alex’s lungs left him as the quick blur of a fist landed in his stomach, knocking him backward. Alex gripped his stomach, his insides feeling like they had just been compressed into the same pancake-like flatness of the two sentry trucks.

The man fisted a cluster of Alex’s hair and lifted him off the ground. “Well, I know who you are.” A nasty left cross connected to the other side of Alex’s face, balancing out the marks, and the pain, imprinted on his cheeks. Through the firing spasms of pain, the man’s words jingled around Alex’s head. Alex padded his hands and knees in the dirt, trying to get his bearings.

“Emma Claire was my sister,” the man said.

A powerful right hook across Alex’s chin cracked his teeth together in a pop that sounded like shattered glass. He couldn’t focus. Everything was a blur. The earth underneath him seemed to move and shift like waves in the ocean. The only connection he was able to make wasn’t where he was, or the fact that he still had community members inside the factory and in the forest, but the smile of a woman he’d met not long ago.

But in the same confusion in which the woman’s smile had appeared, it morphed into distortion. It no longer held the natural beauty of purpose and strength, but the brutal finality of deceit and disgust, until it faded into the shadow of another figure. A faceless man walked toward him. An imminent feeling of calamity struck into the very soul of Alex’s being. Alex could hear the man’s voice proclaiming acts of treachery, tongue lashing Alex virulently. With every syllable uttered, the faceless man morphed into Todd. The past had caught up with Alex, and the archangel in front of him had arrived to ensure that Alex received what was coming to him.

“Wait!”

The voice came from the clearing smoke at the factory’s entrance, and the soldiers diverted their attention away from Alex’s painful skirmish.

“Please! He’s not a sentry.”

“Like hell he isn’t,” Emma’s brother replied.

The blurred savior that rescued Alex from another vicious beating came into focus, and Alex felt the calm waves of relief as Harper came into view.

“I don’t know what happened in Wyoming. But I know that whatever he did, he must have had good reason to do it,” Harper said.

“No,” Alex answered.

Both Harper and Emma’s brother looked at Alex, who had managed to push himself off the ground. He spat a dribble of blood and saliva and could already feel the sides of his face swelling up.

“I remember your sister’s face,” Alex said. “The hate. The anger. She wanted to kill me.”

Emma’s brother’s hand twitched over the pistol at his waist, a glimmer of Alex’s blood shining on his thick knuckles of granite. That pair of eyes looking over every different way that he could make Alex hurt.

“And that’s what you’re here to do now, isn’t it?” Alex asked.

“Wait! Stop!” Harper yelled, rushing to Alex’s side, before the soldiers blocked him. Instead of looking at Emma’s brother, Harper looked at Alex when he spoke, trying to let his words revive whatever life Alex had left. “Don’t let him kill you.”

For whatever reason, those words permeated through all the pain, the anguish, and guilt that had plagued Alex’s mind since he’d left for Wyoming. As much as he wanted it to end, Alex still had one mission left.

“I can help you get them back,” Alex said.

“And why should I trust anything that comes out of your mouth?” Emma’s brother asked.

“You don’t have to,” Alex answered, thinking back to the bag on his bed. “I have one of the Coalition’s computers.”

Chapter 4

The fishing villages along the Louisiana coast were locked down. Every fisherman with a boat was landlocked, and all of their vessels commandeered by the Coalition. The salt-crusted faces trudged sullenly around their shacks, glaring at the self-appointed sentries who held them captive.

An elderly man, far beyond the age of usefulness, wobbled in the muddy dirt as a unit of sentries led by Dean Grout almost trampled him on their way to the control station where the gates to the community were still being assembled.

“How many?” Dean asked.

“The report said it was the Atlantic fleet, Chief. It didn’t provide any other details besides that,” the Class 2 sentry answered.

The fact that there wasn’t a Naval presence in the Gulf was what made the coast so appealing in the first place, but now that they had caught the attention of the Navy’s entire Atlantic fleet, their strategic situation was about to change.

“They won’t be able to flank us from the north, so I want every available sentry stationed along the coastal perimeter. And make sure you radio every other community on the coast to disperse their sentries within the community’s population. The Navy won’t risk using their bombs if they know we’re right next to civilians. Make them come to us.”

“Yes, sir!”

A rare ocean breeze cooled the sweat collecting on Dean’s face as he tried to adjust his uniform to allow some of the sweltering heat to escape. He didn’t like the swamps and bayous. He wanted to get back to Topeka as quickly as possible, but until the Navy left or pushed them out, he was stuck here.

Dean found himself glancing out into the water’s horizon, waiting to see the iron ships make landfall, but each time there was nothing but the bayou’s calm waters. Still, beyond what he couldn’t see was a threat that could kill him. His way of life would grow extinct, and he would be either forced into the ground or into a cell. At that moment, he wasn’t sure which he’d prefer.

Strength had always come easily for Dean. Ever since grade school, he’d been the biggest kid in his class. And whenever he wanted something, all he had to do was take it. The only repercussions back then were a trip to the principal’s office or a stay in time-out.

But as he grew older, the consequences for his behavior morphed from time-out to juvy bars, and it was then he realized that even with all of his strength, he couldn’t bend steel. No matter how hard he punched, he couldn’t escape the concrete walls that enclosed him. His strength was a tool that, when wielded, only landed him in confinement.

All those years skipping class, homework, and tests had left him with no high school diploma, no job, and no life. Before the Coalition and before Gordon, he did nothing but enforcer jobs that paid next to shit. But when the soil crisis hit, it was like the second coming of the Dark Age. A time where brute force was the only authority recognized, and whoever could hit the hardest won. And there wasn’t anyone who hit harder than Dean Grout.

If the Soil Coalition lost this fight to the United States, then all of that would be over. The level of involvement he’d had with the Coalition over the past three years would have him tried, and convicted, of whatever crimes-against-humanity bullshit the courts could throw at him.

“Chief!”

Dean turned around from the coast and was met with a panicked look from his Class 2. “What is it?”

“One of the scouts on patrol radioed a confirmation of a unit of soldiers making landfall a mile west of here.”

“How many?”

“The transmission cut out before we could get an answer.”

“I want every gun, missile, bomb, and truck stationed to the west. Anyone else still out on patrol, tell them to get their asses back here before I run out and kill them myself!”

“Yes, sir.”

One hundred sentries had gathered at their makeshift wall to the west, shielded behind armor-plated trucks. Eyes searched the dense bayou in organized patterns of fear and adrenaline. Dean marched along the back row, watching his men, watching beyond the wall, and feeling the waves of the ocean to his left bringing a sense of overwhelming finality. The slow moving of thick muscle and steel, wielded by equally dense minds, only added to the calamity held in their incompetent hands.

After an hour of squatting, waiting for the soldiers to show up, the minds of Dean and his men had finally matched the inactivity of their own bodies. Dean leaned to the left, triggering a wave of cracks along his back.

“Sir, they could have moved farther west. We did occupy more villages in that direction.”

“Have the communities there sent us any word?” Dean asked.

“No, sir.”

It could have just been a simple recon mission, setting the Navy’s men up for a bigger play, but the fact that his men were killed before they had a chance to report how many soldiers they’d come across caused the smallest of wheels to turn in Dean’s mind.

“Do a final check with the communities to the west. If they’re still clear within the next hour, then go ahead and––”

The explosion sent both molten pieces of metal and human limbs into the air around them, cutting a hole in the flesh-infused steel wall.

Dean wobbled on all fours, his palms sinking into the thick mud squishing between his fingers. The gunshots echoing at the front line only added to Dean’s concussed state of mind as he managed to get his feet under him.

“Chief!” the Class 2 said. “What do we do?”

“Fire back!”

Dean charged to the front line and positioned himself in the thick of the fight. Sentries fired blindly into the swamp, propelled by fear and their own sheer will to stay alive no matter what the cost. While the others wasted bullets, Dean took his time, looking for any sign of where the blast may have come from, but saw nothing.

“Hold your fire!” Dean said.

Dean’s orders were echoed down the line, and the sporadic thumping of gunshots slowly petered out. Smoke from the lingering fires drifted in and out of Dean’s view as the gunshots were replaced by the moaning cries of the injured sentries from the previous blast. Their pained voices pleading for a divinity to come and save them, which Dean knew would never come.

Then, between two puffs of smoke, Dean could make out the whites of eyes, buried deep under the thick cover of swamp.

“To the right!” Dean shouted.

Thousands of rounds of ammunition were exchanged as Dean and his sentries entrenched themselves, and the United States soldiers continued their push forward. The smell of lead and copper blended with the humid stench of the swamp.

While the majority of Dean’s focus was on the advancing soldiers in front of him, he couldn’t help but let his eyes wander to the peripheral, where his wounded sentries were being carried away. Streaks of blood smeared into the mud, only adding to the dark textures of the earth. Sentries clutched their wounds, trying to hold whatever organs and fluids escaped. One of the bodies he saw was blown in half, completely lifeless, and he ceased his firing when he saw two other sentries picking up the pieces of their fallen comrade.

“Hey!” Dean said. “He’s already dead, so unless you want to join him, I suggest you drop the body, grab your gun, and fight, goddammit!”

The sentries complied, and Dean aimed the crosshairs of his scope over as many enemy limbs as he could find, squeezing the trigger with a negligent purpose until one of the shells that ejected burnt the exposed flesh on his forearm.

Each violent pull propelled a two-inch piece of hot lead at 1700 miles per hour. Dean could feel every ounce of force in those shots, and a fulfilling pleasure when the deadly projectile disabled and maimed its victim. The successive click of the firing pin signaled for a replacement magazine, but before Dean could reload, he heard the strained, throaty scream, “RPG!”

Dean flattened himself on the ground as the explosion disfigured the resolve of what was left of the sentry’s line in the sand. A blast of flesh-melting heat washed over Dean’s back as he buried himself deeper into the mud to avoid the scorching. Once the ground had ceased its quaking, he wiped the muck from his eyes. The mangled flesh and twisted metal had doubled. Whoever wasn’t already dead in the mud was retreating back to the villages behind them. 

Clumps of mud fell from the front of Dean’s uniform and splashed back into the earth as he joined the unauthorized retreat. The roaring stampede of boots against the Louisiana mud was only matched by the sporadic gunfire growing louder behind them. Dean bulldozed his way past anyone slower than him until his fingers reached the door handle for one of the vehicles parked by one of the small huts of tin and twigs. Dean cranked the engine to life and locked the truck’s doors just as another one of his men came rushing toward him. The sentry pounded on the window, streaking the glass with mud and blood.

“Hey! Let me in! Let me in!”

The shouts were muffled through the truck’s thick glass, and Dean could see the first wave of United States soldiers entering the village’s muddy streets.

“You hold this village, sentry!” Dean yelled.

But the sentry’s only response was another flurry of smacks against the windshield and a stream of insubordinate curses that fell on deaf ears. Dean shifted the truck into reverse then sharply turned a one-eighty, which sent up a fishtail of mud behind him.

The sentries Dean passed were caught up in an animalistic panic that had reduced their minds to savagery. Sentries threw bodies of women and children in front of them as human shields, each piece of fleshy Kevlar screaming and crying to be let go, and anyone who tried to save them was met with a 5.56-caliber bullet to the head. But even with the atrocities occurring around him, all Dean could concentrate on was the story he was going to tell Gordon when he made it back to Topeka.

***

Three-dimensional DNA models rotated on computer screens as Sydney continued his reconstruction of Todd’s work. He’d completely submerged himself in the research, losing himself in the intricate data that Todd’s mind created with nothing more than a few pieces of equipment in a hole in the ground. But instead of a scientist, working on the latest research from one of the brightest minds of the century, he felt more akin to a burglar, rummaging through the drawers of a home he had no business being in. 

“How much longer is this going to take?” Jake asked.

Sydney’s previous hijinks had cost him any goodwill with Gordon, and as a result, Jake was now with him twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

“I told you I can’t put a timeline on this,” Sydney answered.

“I can’t fucking wait to get out of this fucking lab,” Jake said, talking more to himself than Sydney.

The stress of the past two days seemed to be affecting Jake more than it was Sydney. The wolf behind him didn’t enjoy the cage as much as the lab rat. The truth was, Sydney wasn’t in any hurry to finish what Todd had started. He knew the moment he turned in the final reconstructed solution to Gordon, he was a dead man. With each new DNA sequence he completed, the tip of his shovel dug the pit of his own grave a little deeper.

A part of Sydney held out hope that his father would still be able to pull some strings, send in a unit to break him out, or have won the war with the Coalition before he was able to finish the reconstruction of Todd’s data. But Sydney knew that Gordon would keep him as a hostage in whatever last stand Gordon had in mind, which would most likely end with him dead.

The computer beeped, signaling another completed DNA sequence, and the needle on the gauge of Sydney’s emotions edged another inch closer toward angst. Sydney rolled his chair over to the second of three computers at his disposal, and when he maximized the window, he saw a notification in his email. The subject line was blank, along with the sender, and resembled the same embedded emails he used to communicate with his father and Alex during his time in Wyoming.

Sydney’s spine grew slightly stiffer as he carefully closed out of the email and continued on with his work. There was no way he’d be able to use the computer to check something like that with Jake constantly hovering over him. But he did remember the backup cell phone he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk. 

Sydney grabbed his clipboard, jotting down a few notes from the computer screen, when he started vigorously tapping the clipboard with his pen. “Dammit.”

“What?” Jake asked.

Sydney waved him off, walking over to his desk. “Nothing. Just out of ink.”

“What an emergency,” Jake drawled.

The desk was behind the equipment, and Sydney glanced back over his shoulder, where he could see the top of Jake’s head leisurely making its way around the computers. Sydney quickly opened the bottom drawer, shuffling through the random office supplies and lab notes until he found the cell phone. He hid it under the clipboard in his hand and started searching for the charger. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d used it and wasn’t even sure if it would turn on.

“Hey,” Jake said.

Sydney froze in his hunched over position, still moving items around and scraping against the sides of the drawer in a quiet panic.

“Hey!” Jake repeated.

Sydney finally looked up, and Jake was pinching a pen between his fingers. “I don’t have all day.”

“Right,” Sydney said, taking the pen and closing his desk drawer. “Thanks.” He could feel the beads of sweat rolling from his armpits and over the lumps that were his ribcage. Keeping the phone hidden underneath the clipboard, he rushed back over to the computer and continued jotting down notes.

Sydney waited another hour before he told Jake he needed to use the restroom, and by that time the phone was practically slick with sweat. Jake escorted him to the bathroom and, per their arrangement, waited just outside the stall.

“You have three minutes,” Jake said.

Sydney slid the stall’s lock into place, sat down, and pulled the phone from his pocket. He closed his eyes as his fingers hovered over the power button, reciting the softest prayer he’d ever let his mouth utter, which included both hopes of the phone turning on, and it making no noise once it did. He gently pressed the power button, held it, then released and let out the lightest of sighs as the phone’s screen lit up soundlessly.

Once the homepage loaded, he quickly selected his email and waited for it to update. Sydney’s eyes shifted from the phone’s screen to the door. He could feel the sweat collecting under his arms and on his forehead. He wasn’t sure how much time he had left, but Jake’s pounding on the stall door and a harsh “hurry it up” didn’t make him believe he had much time.

The inbox finally finished updating, and Sydney quickly tapped the screen to select the mystery email he saw on his computer in the lab. And just as he thought, when he selected the email, he was greeted with the black and white of an encrypted message from Alex:

Sydney,

I need you to locate the man and woman who were taken from the Wyoming community where I was stationed. If you can get me this, I’ll get you out from underneath Gordon’s thumb. If you don’t reply within the next hour, the deal is off the table.

Alex

The battery percentage on the phone flashed at less than ten percent. Even if he could manage to hack into the database from the phone, which he couldn’t, he wouldn’t have enough time or battery power to do it. Sydney bit his lower lip in a nervous fervor. Right now, he only had one card to play. He quickly hit reply and started typing.

Alex,

I don’t have that kind of access anymore. Gordon has me under lock and key, with a guard on me at all times. He has me working on replicating Todd’s work. The best I can do is stall, but whatever you have planned, make sure you do it quickly, because I don’t know how much longer I’m going to last.

Sydney

The moment he tapped send another series of blows landed on the door that rattled the entire grouping of stalls in the bathroom. Sydney pocketed the phone and flushed. When he opened the door, he was greeted by Jake’s sour face.

With Jake refusing to move, Sydney maneuvered around him, keeping his head down, and made his way to the door. The moment he touched the handle Jake called out to him.

“What are you doing?” Jake asked.

A frozen chill brought him to a motionless state, with the tip of his fingers glued to the door handle. All he could think about was the phone in his pocket. Had Jake heard me? Had he seen the phone? Sydney slowly turned around, his face a ghostly white. Jake kept his arms crossed over his chest and took a few quick steps in Sydney’s direction until he was directly in front of him.

“What are you, a fucking animal?” Jake asked.

“What?”

“Wash your hands.”

The icy hand of fear loosened its grip, and Sydney quickly moved to the sink, sighing a breath of relief as the water hit his hands.

***

Luis thought it appropriate that the man who had worked for the Coalition and betrayed his sister should be chained in the same building where his fellow coworkers used to live. And now with Nelson relaying the message from Sydney via the laptop Alex provided, Luis had all the reason he needed to end Alex’s pathetic existence, and this time there was nowhere for him to run and hide.

Luis had worked over every angle in his mind the ways he could make Alex hurt. But like most creatures that slithered in the shadows, this one was hard to pin down. Since his arrival, he’d been bombarded by community members begging for Alex’s release. Two individuals in particular were more adamant than the rest. One of which was a young boy who had also requested that he receive his laptop back after Nelson was done with it.

What added to Luis’s conundrum was the fact that almost everything from Alex’s story checked out. Nelson was able to confirm by hacking into the Coalition’s servers and finding the paper trail Gordon had left behind that corresponded with Alex’s indentured servitude.

“Luis,” Nelson said, “you have a call from the admiral.”

The fact that Nelson had the ability to hack into the Coalition’s servers and access information would give them a very powerful edge in the fight against Gordon, but the fact that Nelson hadn’t been able to locate Emma and Todd was cause for concern, and why Luis agreed to reach out to Sydney in the first place.

“Hello, Admiral,” Luis said, taking the satellite phone.

“What’s left of the Coalition seems to be making their last stands in Topeka and the coast of Texas at the refineries. What are the casualties so far on your end?” Frizen asked.

“Thirty dead, ninety wounded. Where are we at with the fisheries?”

“We’ve retaken most of the Louisiana and Mississippi coastlines, but Gordon isn’t giving up the refineries as easily as the fishing villages. He knows once we have the refineries back, it’s only a matter of time before we get to him in Topeka.”

“It’s hard to run a fascist state without any fuel.”

“That’s why I need you and your men there to help reinforce the efforts.”

It took Luis a few seconds for the admiral’s words to sink in. “Sir, we have the Coalition on the run. If they’re retreating back to Topeka, then that’s where my men should head,” Luis said.

“I understand that, Commander, but the sentries in Texas have sealed themselves in the refinery, and we can’t risk bombing any of the installations to bring them down. They’re too valuable for rebuilding efforts after the war. We need as many men down there as possible to begin infiltration.”

The only face and name running through Luis’s mind was his sister’s. All he could think about was breaking into Topeka, getting her out, and then killing Gordon with his bare hands. Each moment that wasn’t spent marching toward Topeka was another moment she was meant to suffer.

“Sir, my men and I are ready to handle Topeka. We can end this conflict within a few days, possibly sooner. If we just reallocate some of the men from Tex—”

“I know about your sister, Luis.”

Luis moved his lips, forming soundless words. The moment he discovered his sister was taken, he’d been driving his men like hounds on a dogsled toward Topeka, toward Alex, toward revenge. He was mixing his mission mandate with his personal one.

“I know how difficult this is for you,” Admiral Frizen said. “But we need to focus on ending this conflict as quickly as possible to minimize the total loss of life. Once we retake the refineries, all efforts will be coordinated to attack Gordon in Topeka with everything we have.”

Under all the emotions of hate and revenge and murder that surfaced from the deepest depths of Luis’s being, he knew the Admiral was right. He knew the first mission was to win this war and restore peace.

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you, Commander.”

“Admiral, there’s something you should know. Sydney Farnes is working on reconstructing Todd’s soil solution.”

“You’re telling me it hasn’t been completed yet?”

“Yes, sir, but I don’t know how much longer it’s going to stay that way.”

“Thank you for the information, Commander.”

When the call ended, his grip against the black plastic of the phone only whitened his knuckles. Flashes of his sister in the farm camp triggered spasms of pain to ripple throughout his body. He slowly handed Nelson the satellite phone back and looked over to Alex, which was the only pair of eyes in the room still watching him.

“I need the room,” Luis said.

The last soldier outside shut the bullet-riddled door behind him, leaving Luis and Alex alone. Sunlight from outside shone through the broken glass and bullet holes, casting the rays of light onto the floor in scattered patterns. 

The chains around Alex’s ankles and wrists scraped against the concrete as he shifted from the uncomfortable silence. Luis, however, hadn’t moved a muscle since he’d spoken. He stood there, like a statue made of solid granite, unwavering, unmovable, with no amount of force on earth that could break him.

“The members of your community will be transported to Wyoming to the safe zone until the conflict is over,” Luis said.

“Thank you.”

“But you will be staying with me. Despite the details and pleas of your community, you still acted in concert with a man who is now branded as a terrorist of the United States of America. You will be tried, and if there is any justice, you will be convicted.”

“I know you still want to kill me.”

Luis took his first few steps forward, his tree-trunk legs causing the very ground they conquered to quiver. He stopped at Alex’s feet and squatted to meet him at eye level. His voice sounded almost too soft for the giant frame it escaped from.

“I’ve wanted to kill you ever since I rode into Wyoming and found out my sister had been taken off to rot in some farm camp. There isn’t anything in this life that would bring me more pleasure than to rip you limb from limb right here, right now. But, unlike you, I have orders. And also, unlike you, I have to follow them, despite what I want to do. So you can sing whatever sad song you need to make yourself believe that what you did to my family was justified, but the reality is you did it to save yourself,” Luis said then rose and marched to the door. “We’ll be heading into some heavy combat zones. If you happen to die in one of our battles, then far be it from me to stop the hand of fate.”

Main Street was thick with a mixture of community members and Luis’s soldiers. He made his way through the crowd and found Ray and Nelson, still with the laptop, sitting in the shade of the tank parked by the community’s front entrance.

“How long will it take for you to find out where Emma and Todd are?” Luis asked.

“I don’t know,” Nelson answered. “If Gordon didn’t register them in the system under their real names, which I don’t think he did since I haven’t been able to locate them, it could be a while.”

“Shit.”

“You don’t like him.”

Ray smacked Nelson on the shoulder. “Of course he doesn’t like him. I don’t like him. You don’t like him. He’s a fucking coward.”

“I never said I didn’t like him,” Nelson said.

“You’re kidding, right?” Ray asked.

Nelson turned to Luis and closed the laptop. “What would you do for your sister?”

“Anything. And that goes for all of you. You know that.”

“Well, that’s how he felt about his community. The people here were his friends, his family. He wanted to protect them.”

“He wanted to protect himself,” Ray said.

“I’m not saying that you should be friends with him, I’m merely suggesting that you look at the situation from a different angle. That’s all,” Nelson said.

Luis had to look at a lot of things at a lot of different angles over the past few years. The ability to adapt to the situation at hand was important, but having the resolve to continue with your own values in the face of those adaptations was something Luis always believed to be even more important. He could never understand how an individual could forsake everything they believed in by the whim of someone they didn’t know or respect.

People lost the ability and belief that they held their own destiny in their hands. They’d forgotten they controlled what happened to them. They weren’t lost and drifting in some pointless chaos. All they had to do was act, but not everyone responded the way Luis did when someone put a gun to his head.

Chapter 5

Two piles of papers rested on Jared’s desk. The shorter pile, which was only a few inches tall, was the case files yet to be read in regard to the different strategies Gordon might use against the United States, and the second, much taller stack, which stood at almost two feet in height, was what he’d already read.

Everything the president’s advisors had provided led to only two real, plausible scenarios. The first was to defeat the United States military, which Gordon was losing at a terrible rate, and the second was to run. And years of closing deals in the conference room had given him the nose to sniff out a runner, and he would bet his last dollar that Gordon was already packing his bags.

Earlier intelligence suggested the Chinese would provide some type of offer to Gordon to extract him from the country in exchange for the soil data. They had the deepest pockets and resources to provide such an escape, but as the sunset drew closer, there would be no doubt other countries would put their hat in the ring—off the record, of course.

A knock on his office door interrupted his research efforts, as Jared’s highest trusted advisor, Marcus Semp, entered in a hurried rush.

“We received confirmation on Sydney’s location,” Marcus said.

“Where?”

“Topeka.”

The heart of Gordon’s Coalition was impenetrable at the moment. He had tens of thousands of troops stationed around the city, but with his outside supply routes slowly disappearing, he wouldn’t be able to keep control of them for long.

Jared noticed a sense of trepidation in Marcus, waiting for the right time to say something he was afraid Jared would take offense to.

“What is it?” Jared asked.

“The president. He wants to speak with you.”

“About?”

“He didn’t say, but he wants to see you immediately. I already have the car waiting for you.”

Jared grabbed the stack of papers he’d yet to read, along with his jacket, and marched out to the vehicle. He’d had hundreds of meetings with the president over the past three years. They had ranged from negotiating the arms deal almost four years ago to become the United States military’s number one weapons provider, to helping allocate resources to find a soil cure for the devastating aftereffects caused by GMO-24. In those meetings, as well as the hundreds of thousands of others he’d either been a part of or led during his professional career in the business community, he had never felt a sense of angst, until now.

He knew what the president wanted to meet with him personally about. Anything else could have been discussed over the phone or through an email. But the fact that the president requested an immediate meeting meant only one thing: it was about Sydney.

The complication of his personal life in his business one was something he was always able to avoid by never mixing the two. He didn’t even want Sydney to be a part of the Coalition, but the boy’s mother wouldn’t let up until Sydney could have something that made him feel valued. And now his son was held hostage and possibly being used as leverage against Jared and the president for some sort of deal.

The reason Jared had always avoided any type of entanglement of his personal and professional life was so he wouldn’t have to make the type of decisions he would no doubt be faced with in just a few minutes. He would be forced to choose between saving the country, along with the prospect of being able to return his focus on his company, and saving his son.

Jared never held any self-delusions about the type of man he was, and in the adjectives that were used to describe him when he died, none of them would even be remotely close to “fatherly.”

The White House was in its usual state of panic when Jared arrived, and the secretary outside the Oval Office ushered Jared inside, where the president was currently meeting with the chiefs of staff. The moment Jared walked in, the president called the meeting to an end, and each admiral and general in the room made sure to give Jared a firm handshake with an equally aphoristic nod. When the final officer left and closed the Oval Office door behind him, the president gestured to the couch. “Please, Jared, have a seat.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

“Jared, I can’t stress to you enough how much my administration, and the country, appreciate what you have done over the past three years to help keep us on track through everything that’s happened. We owe you a great de—”

“Mr. President, I have a lot of work to get done, so if you called me here to simply thank me for my contributions, I can tell you that could easily have been accomplished over the phone.”

The president stumbled a bit after that, unsure of how to respond, but eventually found his footing. “I know you’re aware your son is still under the control of the Coalition, but we received word today that he is currently reconstructing the stolen soil data and has requested that the United States military break him out.”

“He’s using the soil data as leverage?”

“It is Admiral Frizen’s analysis, which I agree with, that Sydney is trying to stall his work with the reconstruction in hopes that the war would be over before he finishes.”

Jared nodded, looking over the vacant desk in the room. “Gordon will kill him once he’s done.”

“Yes, we believe that’s why he’s taking his time. But even when we break through in Topeka and win this, Gordon will have a backup plan, which will most likely include your son.”

The president continued to speak, and Jared continued to listen, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the president’s desk. The most powerful men in the world had sat at there, signing some of the very legislation Jared had paid lobbyists millions of dollars to ensure they didn’t pass. And now, he was merely a few feet away from that desk, alone in a room with the president of the United States of America.

“Jared?” the president asked.

“You’re looking for my blessing,” Jared answered.

“Jared, I know how difficult—”

“It’s not difficult, Mr. President. It’s my job. I understand that you can’t guarantee my son’s safety. I understand that his fate will be left to that of a madman who I sent him to work with. I understand that the priority of the nation overrides any notion of fatherhood. But what I don’t understand is why you wasted my time telling me something I already knew.”

Out of every emotion Jared could have felt at that moment, he had one that surprised him: anger. He was angry that he had to be here. He was angry over what happened with his country. He was angry with the president. He was angry with his family, his staff, his job. He was angry with himself.

With the president still offering a few aphoristic apologies, Jared rushed out of the Oval Office and back into his car, waiting for him outside. He slammed the door shut before the driver could do it for him and roughly rubbed the frustration out of his forehead until his skin was a scarlet red.

The driver only confirmed that he would be taking Jared back to his office then remained quiet during the rest of the trip. Jared let his hand fall to the seat, where it landed on top of the stack of papers he’d brought with him, containing the information given to him from the president’s staff. Thousands of pieces of paper all saying the same thing in different ways. Jared picked up the stack and rolled down the window. The driver gave him a few odd glances in the rearview mirror as Jared released the documents into the air and watched them scatter along the highway behind them, but said nothing.

With the stack of bureaucracy firmly behind Jared, he rolled up the window and tilted his head back. Gordon would lose, but with the original creator of the GMO-24 vaccine MIA and his son working on recreating the formula for Gordon, Jared wasn’t sure whether the soil data would be a part of that victory or not.

***

Hundreds of armored trucks and thousands of sentries marched through the streets of Topeka, turning the once-quiet Midwestern town into Gordon Reath’s personal fortress. The constant drum of boots against the asphalt could only be outdone by Gordon’s virulent screams at every new report that arrived informing him of his sentries’ failures to hold the communities under their control.

Dean Grout, still dripping Louisiana mud on Gordon’s floor, bolted out of the room with his tail between his legs, leaving Gordon in fumes alone in his office. He stepped over Dean’s muddy footprints on his way to lock the door then immediately entered a video conference with Sheng.

“Mr. President,” Gordon said. “I hope you’ve given more thought to my proposal.”

Sheng smiled. His round cheeks and taut skin made it difficult to determine just how old the man was, but the dark pupils in his eyes gave him an almost ancient look, balancing out whatever plastic surgery had ironed out the wrinkles and age spots along his face.

“Your recent losses haven’t evoked much confidence in your soldiers’ abilities, Gordon. I’m afraid that until we see some sort of progress we will no longer be able to continue our discussion.”

“Regardless of what happens with this war, you and I both know I’m the one with the soil data, and that will become increasingly valuable the longer this conflict rages on. I’m sure there will be a lot of buyers out there who would jump at the opportunity.”

“But I’m wondering how many of those buyers have the resources to extract you safely? Good luck, Gordon.”

The connection ended before Gordon could get in another word. Ultimately, he knew the Chinese wouldn’t risk losing such an important piece of data like the soil solution, but despite Gordon’s detestation of Sheng’s ability to have the upper hand, he knew Sheng was right. There wasn’t another country that could offer the same resources as China, which was the only country left to even consider challenging the US. Sheng would wait until Gordon had no other option before he offered him any type of deal. And when Sheng did, Gordon knew he would take whatever was put on the table.

***

The longer the tank rolled forward, the larger the tight ball of stiffness in Alex’s lower back grew. His wrists were cuffed directly to the tank’s frame, and the restricted mobility was wearing him down. And the entire time, watching with the barrel of a gun pointed at him, was Ray.

Ray kept the thousand-yard stare while Alex shifted uncomfortably. He looked at the way Ray held the pistol in his hand. It was a 9mm Smith and Wesson with a solid-black finish. The pistol had quite a bit of recoil, and Ray was holding it in one hand.

“You ever fired one of tho—”

“You need to shut the fuck up,” Ray answered.

“I’m trying to help, Ray.”

“I don’t give a shit what you’re trying or not trying to do,” Ray replied, a dribble of spit rolling down his chin to accentuate his disdain. “The first chance I get, I’m going to put a bullet in the back of your skull.”

Despite all the anger and frustration Alex had received so far, he knew that underneath the vengeful demeanor portrayed on the surface was just a man who was scared. Ray’s eyes were the same beaded angry that Alex saw at the seed silo he was charged with guarding over three years ago. Eyes centered in a pool of hate-filled purpose fueled by a hunger that swelled from the deepest wells of the soul. And just like those angry extremists Alex was forced to fight at the silo, he couldn’t blame Ray for what he felt toward him. It was nothing more than the man’s own inability to see past what he couldn’t control. And it wasn’t something Alex would be able to change Ray’s mind on.

“I know what you think of me, Ray. I do. I know you’ll want to fight, but if you do, you need to be prepared, and if you fired that pistol the way you’re holding it right now, it would fly out of your hand.”

For the first time since the trip started, Ray’s eyes shifted from Alex to the gun. Finally, he brought his left hand over to keep a firmer grasp. A radio call arrived, and the tank tracks were ordered to come to a stop. The soldiers removed their seat straps, and one of them tapped Ray on the shoulder, and he reluctantly unlocked the cuffs around Alex’s wrists.

Outside, the distant thunder of gunshots echoed from what looked to be an oil refinery about three hundred yards in the distance. The other caravan of tanks and trucks transporting soldiers had come to a halt, and Luis was standing in the center of a circle, surrounded by tired faces and sagging shoulders.

“All right, everyone, listen up!” Luis said. “The seizure of that refinery is our main objective. Coalition forces have embedded themselves inside, and every attempt to flush them out that won’t damage the integrity of the refinery has been attempted and failed.”

“How many sentries?” one of the soldiers asked.

“Intelligence indicates that there are over thirty combatants inside, but that’s not the only piece of information we received. The sentries inside are Class 3s,” Luis answered.

A whistle broke through the quiet murmur spreading throughout the crowd, accompanied by a silent hesitation and a few of the soldiers taking a step back. When Alex had been in the sentry program, he was given an aptitude test that would help the Coalition gauge what type of sentry he would be. The results of the exam were categorized into three separate units. The first and lowest was Class 1. This was your typical foot soldier or individual tasked with simple jobs and functions. The only real qualification needed to make it as a Class 1 was that you had a trigger finger and were vicious enough to use it on anyone.

The next classification was Class 2, which was what Alex had been. These individuals were officer material. Each Class 2 was assigned a unit of Class 1s to lead and manage in a specific area. It was the responsibility of a Class 2 to ensure that the men under their command followed orders and didn’t exceed their given mandate.

The final category was reserved for individuals who possessed a high mental capacity which would be applied in the application of war. Once it was determined they were smart enough for the category, they were then put through a physical examination to determine strength, endurance, speed, agility, and pain tolerance. Nothing but the highest marks on the physical portion of the exam were accepted. These individuals could solve a Rubik’s cube during their five-minute-mile run. These elite specimens were Class 3s.

During Alex’s tenure both in and out of the sentry program, he’d only seen a group of Class 3 sentries once. It was just one year after the formation of the Coalition, and Gordon was sending “special” units for an annual inspection of the communities to ensure their compliance with all Coalition policies.

At the time, Alex’s community only had two children. Meeko and another slightly older boy named Benny, who lived in another one of the Coalition houses with two older men whom Alex would have trusted with his own children if he had any. Everyone was marched outside and formed a line, just like during a blood sampling. The Class 3s rolled in and piled out of their truck. There were only four of them, each decked out in a dark-blue, rather than the solid-black uniforms the other sentries wore, adorned with some very top-of-the-line hardware. 

But aside from everything they wore and despite their size, what Alex noticed most were their eyes. Each pupil Alex came into view with had the vicious sincerity of ruthlessness. It was something more powerful than just raw, unbridled emotions. It was a vicious intelligence Alex had never seen before, and even he couldn’t stop the chill running up the back of his spine.

One of the Class 3s looked each of the community members over until he finally stopped when he arrived at Benny, who was no older than thirteen at the time. The Class 3 reached into his pocket and pulled out a chocolate bar. He bent down to meet the boy at eye level, and Alex remembered his entire body tensing up.

The sentry told Benny that if he would run as far as he could without stopping, then he would give him the candy bar. Everyone, including the Class 1 sentries permanently stationed in the community, had their eyebrows raised. And just as he should be, Benny was skeptical.

Finally, Benny took off at a trot, slowly breaking out into a sprint, kicking up dust behind him as he pumped his legs harder and harder. The Class 3 kept urging him on, challenging him to keep going, even if he had to run beyond the community’s gates. The boy ran for almost two minutes before he finally came to a stop two hundred yards outside the front gates. Alex had to squint his eyes to see the boy, who looked nothing more than a speck of flesh against the rolling hills behind him.

The next few moments seemed to pass in slow motion. Alex remembered seeing the boy bend over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath while the Class 3 brought the scope of the rifle to his eye. Alex watched the sentry’s finger move to the trigger and suddenly became aware of his feet pushing him forward to the sentry’s position.

Alex felt every pulsating beat in his chest and every inhale and exhale of his breath as a red-hot flash of heat consumed him. He tried to bum-rush the sentry but was tackled to the ground before he could reach his goal. Despite the other sentries holding him down, Alex kept clawing at the earth to try and stop the Class 3, who didn’t break concentration no matter how much Alex screamed for the boy to run. But Benny just stood there, frozen outside the gates on the side of a hill.

When the Class 3 finally squeezed the trigger, Alex screamed until he thought his lungs would cough up blood. The bastards even had the audacity to drive out to where the boy’s body lay, tie a rope around his ankles, and drag him back up the hill for the community to see him.

The Class 3s didn’t say anything after that or perform any further inspections. They simply got back in their car and drove away. The community had received the message loud and clear. Even when you’re not doing anything wrong, even when you’re following the rules you’re forced to comply with at gunpoint, they still hold your life in their hands, and they can do whatever they want with it.

That same ruthlessness and skill were waiting for Luis and his men inside the oil refinery. Alex knew they could eventually outnumber them, but he didn’t believe Luis understood how many men they’d lose in the process. They would take the oil back, but every gallon of oil they reclaimed would cost an equal amount of blood.

Chapter 6

Luis and a few of his officers were gathered around the laptop to look at the schematics of the refinery Nelson had pulled up. The refinery itself was spread over six hundred acres of land, with just as many buildings, structures, and ambush points for him and his men to walk into.

“Our intel indicates that the majority of the forces are here,” Luis said, pointing to the center of the refinery, “at the distillation center. It’s one of the most vital sections of the refinery, and they know we won’t bomb it. Out of all the possible entrance locations, the easiest way in would be through the holding tank fields. We’d have a clear line of sight, but if we know it’s the easiest way in, then so will the sentries. It’ll be a dogfight either way, but this will give us the best chance from a strategic standpoint.”

The officers nodded in agreement, but Luis couldn’t help but notice the twitching fingers and pale faces.

“The Class 3s also have a team of hostages that are still keeping the refinery running, so they’ll most likely try and use the civilians as a weapon against us as well. Give your men the rundown, and have everyone meet back here and ready to go in thirty minutes. We’ll have the trucks take us as close as they can, and then we’ll be on foot the rest of the way.”

Nelson closed the laptop, and before he scurried away, Luis grabbed his shoulder. “Nelson, I’m going to need every single man for this mission.”

“Luis, I don’t think I’m suited for any military application.”

“No, you’re not. But I will need someone to stay behind and make sure Alex doesn’t take off. You think you’ll be all right alone with him?”

“Yes, that shouldn’t be an issue.”

“Good. And look, I also want you manning our communication frequencies. If we fail this mission, I’ll need you to make sure Admiral Frizen hears about it. Even if we do lose, we should weaken the sentries enough for another unit to come in and finish the job.”

“I understand.”

Nelson turned to leave, and Luis hesitated before grabbing his shoulder again and spinning him around. “Nelson, if something happens to me, I want you to promise me something.”

“I’ll do everything I can to find her, Luis.”

Luis gave a few heavy thumps on Nelson’s shoulder and turned away before the tear forming in the corner of his eye rolled down his cheek. He blinked a few times and wiped his eyes when Ray grabbed his arm.

“You sure Nelson will be all right with that guy?” Ray asked. “I mean, I love Nelson, but when it comes to confrontation, he’s not the most reliable source.”

“Alex will be cuffed at both his wrists and ankles, Ray. He won’t be going anywhere. Trust me. You ready for this?”

“If it gets us closer to getting Todd and Emma back, then yes.”

Once the orders had spread through the ranks, everyone loaded up into the trucks and headed toward the pillars in the distance spewing fire and smoke from the tips of their stacks. The entire refinery was surrounded by a concrete fence, so once they made it to the wall, the trucks were ditched.

Luis and his force of sixty men weaved their way around the massive tanks holding thousands of gallons of gasoline and other oil by-products. The constant hum of machinery in the distance drowned out the sound of their boots, providing good cover, but also making it difficult to hear anyone that was sneaking up on them. 

The group of sixty had broken off into six smaller units of ten to allow them to navigate through the area with more stealth than the cumbersome stampede of sixty pairs of boots in one location. Their radios were all they needed to alert one another of their location or any obstacles they ran into.

It’d been a while since Luis had done any type of mission like this. Up until this point, everything had been a smash-and-grab job, just bulldozing their way into the communities and blasting anything in a uniform. But this was different. They were about to stumble upon the lion’s den, and it just so happened to be feeding time.

“Containment field clear,” Luis said over the radio, keeping his rifle up with every step forward. He received confirmations from the other units with the same response. So far, so good.

White clouds of steam hissed from pipes overhead that cast a humid heat, only adding to the sweat dripping down Luis’s face. The hallway of pipes twisted and turned in grid-like patterns above them, and massive steel beams kept the maze from collapsing on their heads.

Each of those pipes funneled different types of gas and liquids, and they were so thick that they blocked out the sun above them, without the aid of an actual roof. One wrong-placed bullet could release whatever poisonous contents those pipes carried. 

Luis and the nine other men that composed his unit were alone in the steel jungle gym until a bullet ricocheted off the steel pipes around them, breaking the machinery’s monopoly on sound. The unit split in half as Luis and four others went to the left for cover, and the other five went right. But with all of them crouched behind whatever thin pieces of pipes they could find, no other shots were fired.

“Who’s got eyes on it?” Luis asked.

“I’ve got nothin’, Commander.”

“Looks clear.”

Luis had been in combat situations before, even prior to the missions against the Coalition, but never had his heart pounded this hard, this fast. He was letting the legends of Class 3s get to him. The legends of ghosts. Ghosts that could kill a man without ever showing their faces.

Then, just as mysteriously as the firing stopped, a round of machine-gun fire erupted that punctured the pipes around them, exploding hot gasses and boiling liquids, which only further inhibited their line of sight.

One of his men flailed on the ground, gripping his face, which had blistered and reddened from whatever gas had disfigured his skin. Luis fired in the direction of the machine-gun fire for cover and made his way over to his fallen soldier. “He’s at the top of the pipes!” Luis yelled then squeezed off a few rounds that sent the sentry packing. “Medic!”

The soldier’s face had swollen to almost double in size, making him unrecognizable. White pus started oozing from the patches of red along the side of his face. When Luis looked over to the medic, the medic simply shook his head.

“Nelson?” Luis radioed, but the only thing that came back was jumbled static. “Nelson, do you copy?” Another burst of static blew through his earpiece, and he grabbed the medic’s collar. “Get him out of here. Anyone else still able to fight, with me now!”

Luis turned the corner of the pipe maze, which opened up into another field. He held his men there as he searched the area, wiping away beads of sweat stinging his eyes as he looked over every possible hiding position for the sentries to hold.

“The distillation is just to the northeast of us. This piping runs east for another hundred yards. We use this as our barrier until we can meet up the rest of the units. Keep your rifles up, and watch your feet. We don’t need anyone triggering a trip wire.”

They kept a tight formation with the pipes behind them and their eyes peeled for anything that might be heading toward them. Then, before Luis had time to react, another shot rang out, and blood splattered on the side of Luis’s face as another one of his men hit the ground, with only half of his head hanging on to his neck.

“Cover!”

A cascade of lead rained down upon Luis, and everyone scrambled behind whatever piece of concrete or steel they could find. Bullets ricocheted, shooting sparks and dust into the air until all of Luis’s men had made it behind some type of structure, and the bullets finally stopped. More than once, Luis could feel the vibrations from the shots hit a little too close to home. The sniper was good, and even with the amount of cover they had between here and the distillation facility, there was plenty of room for the sniper to take them out.

Luis peeked over the edge of the concrete slab he was behind to search for the other units. “Does anyone copy? I repeat, does anyone copy?” Nothing but silence. For all Luis knew, the rest of the men were down.

“Listen up!” Luis said, gathering the men he had left. “We go in two at a time. We make him have to choose where he’s going. You don’t pick a cover farther than twenty yards, got it? The longer you’re standing, the longer he has to line up a shot.”

They had to make it farther than just this. The longer Luis and his men were stuck here, the longer it would take for the military to invade Topeka and end this conflict for good. But until Luis was inside that control room with nothing but dead sentries at his feet, that wasn’t going to happen.

***

With every shot and scream that echoed over the radio, Alex cringed. There wasn’t any doubt in his mind that the Class 3s had that placed locked down tighter than Fort Knox. The shackles around his wrists and ankles only exacerbated the feeling of helplessness as he wriggled and writhed on the floor of the tank. Nelson, ignoring any grunts and groans of Alex’s displeasure, was fixated on his laptop.

“Nelson, you need to call for backup,” Alex said.

“I already did,” Nelson replied, continuing his abnormally fast keystrokes without even breaking eye contact with the screen.

But while Alex’s voice wasn’t able to break the barrier of concentration that surrounded Nelson, the blast of gunshots combined with the high-pitched howling of screams caused the rhythmic pace of Nelson’s fingers to slow.

“If Luis and his men are still alive, then they won’t be by the time the cavalry arrives,” Alex said.

“Can you get them out?”

“Yes.”

Nelson immediately reached for the keys and released Alex from his restraints. Every muscle in Alex’s body let out a sigh of relief for their much-appreciated emancipation.

“Show me Luis’s entry point,” Alex said, walking over to the computer. Alex grabbed one of the AR-15s inside the tank, along with two 9mm pistols and enough loaded magazines to make sure he made it out alive or killed as many sentries as he could.

The three-dimensional schematic rotated, and a small dot blinked where Luis and his men had infiltrated the refinery. Nelson constructed a line that followed the path they would have followed upon breaching the walls. “Moving at an average walking speed of four miles per hour, then factoring in stoppage time for recon, as well as any obstacles they encountered, they should be around right here.”

“And what the hell is that?” Alex asked.

“That would be the conversion unit. What it does is change the molecular structure of the heavier materials in t—”

“Nelson, I don’t need the scientific breakdown of what’s happening, I just need to know if it’s sensitive to bullets.”

“Yes. Yes, it’s very sensitive to bullets.”

After receiving a few other quick summaries of what was and wasn’t explosive, Alex jumped behind the wheel of the only truck that was left and made his way to the refinery, leaving Nelson to stand guard and help the cavalry find what was left of the bodies if Alex failed. Once he made it over to the wall, he parked the truck with the others and scaled the concrete barrier to the other side.

The first few steps onto the massive acreage that was the refinery were slow, hesitant. This was uncharted territory, and as much as he admired Luis’s “shoot first and ask questions later” mentality, he couldn’t afford any slipups.

Whenever you go hunting, it’s equally as important to have a good understanding of not just the animal, but also the animal’s environment. And if there was ever a fish out of water, then it would be Alex right now. He bent to one knee and listened, holding his rifle like it was a child, and waiting for any sign or direction.

The distant hum of the oil machinery would only be briefly interrupted by the fast howl of the wind across his ears, but that wasn’t what he was waiting for. And then, after a spout of fire had erupted from one of the stacks in the middle of the refinery, Alex heard the distinct thump of gunshots coming from the northeast.

Alex kept to the perimeter of the wall as he sprinted east. After a good five minutes of keeping up a solid jog, Alex came to a stop, the left side of his stomach cramping. The gunshots were still within earshot, but coming farther from the west now. If Alex’s ears were serving him right, and he headed north, he’d come up right behind the sentries.

Massive gas pumps lined the sides of a large overhang where the truck tankers came and filled up before heading off to distribute them to gas stations around the country. At least, that’s what they used to do. Now they were sent to the Coalition bases, which held all the fuel and controlled the flow of every piece of transportation in the Midwest.

Alex had a system. With every thirty yards he moved forward, he stayed hunkered down for thirty seconds before moving again, and making sure to change that thirty seconds to either forty, thirty-five, or forty-five seconds sporadically, so any snipers didn’t pick up his pattern.

Patience was one of the hardest aspects of hunting to master. Most people can learn to shoot a rifle fairly accurately, and while the art of tracking takes time to get a handle on, it’s not impossible to learn either. But where he’d seen so many of his friends fail would be waiting for their shot, avoiding the aggressiveness of startling their game. That’s why he stopped and waited after each sprint. He was banking that with all the action happening across the refinery, there would be a few itchy trigger fingers just waiting to up their body count.

Most of the firefight was concentrated to the west of him, and he could see a few of the Class 3s posted up in the rafters under the cover of thick beams of steel. Alex propped himself up against the side of a concrete wall and rested his elbows along the top. The crosshairs of the scope lined up just between the knee and the hip of the Class 3 picking off soldiers to the east, with only a few inches of space between two pieces of rigid steel.

Aside from the random spurts of breeze, there wasn’t much wind, and the dry heat would cause the bullet to exit the barrel at a higher velocity, causing it to rise. Alex dropped the crosshairs less than half an inch and exhaled. He placed his finger on the trigger, watching the Class 3 squeeze round after round. Wait for it. Each shot bringing down one of Luis’s soldiers. Wait for it. He could be pinning down someone who needs medical help. Wait for it. He’s killing soldiers. Now.

Alex squeezed the trigger, and the bullet hit the center of the sentry’s thigh between the three-inch gap of the steel beams, and the sentry collapsed to the ground from his position almost two stories high. But before Alex could swing his rifle to the other sentry, he had legions of bullets barreling toward him. He ducked behind the wall for cover and looked to his left, where there was nothing but open space. He darted his head right and could see another pillar of steel closer to where Luis’s soldiers were. Alex took a deep breath then darted for the pillars.

Bullets danced around Alex’s feet on his run, signaling that there was more than one Class 3 hunting him now. He slammed his shoulder into the steel beam as his forward momentum came to an abrupt halt.

Still feeling the vibrations from the bullets hitting the opposite side of the column, Alex pivoted right and found another Class 3 heading right for him. He brought the creature into his crosshairs and pulled the trigger but was a half second too late, allowing the animal to dash behind a concrete barrier.

Another cluster of beams was just to his right and would help continue his trek east to Luis and the other soldiers. The number of cover locations, combined with their close proximity to one another, would give him the ability to maneuver fairly easily through the area.

Before the Class 3 had an opportunity to regain any position, Alex dashed to the pillars and began the methodical approach to Luis and his men in the distance. With the heat of battle engulfing him, he abandoned the pattern upon his earlier arrival and darted between the pillars as fast as he could.

The ring of the bullets from the sentry in pursuit landed on each pillar in different tones, exuding an ominous timbre, as each ring grew louder with the sentry’s chase. With the amount of sweat on his shirt, he felt like he’d been swimming for the past hour. The sweaty fabric clung to his skin with a relentless neediness he just couldn’t shake.

The clunk of the refinery’s machinery intensified along with the symphony of bullets behind Alex as he continued to duck and evade the foaming wolf behind him. A few times, he caught the flash of the sentry’s eyes. They were dark. Black almost, like they were stoic portions of the night sky fighting the light of stars that tried to snuff it out.

“Keep pushing!”

The harsh, authoritative tone was a voice Alex immediately recognized, and he found himself exhaling a sigh of relief that Luis was still alive.

The pillars ahead of him blocked most of the view, but between his sporadic running he was able to catch random glimpses of rifles, legs, and finally, with sweat on his face and bloodstains on his arms, he saw the stout, muscular figure of Luis, who looked equally as astonished to see Alex there with a gun in his hand.

“Look out!” Luis yelled.

Alex immediately ducked behind the nearest pillar as gunfire erupted from all sides. He knelt down, lowering himself to waist height, then turned the corner and sent three bullets into the legs of the Class 3 chasing him, who collapsed in a half-hobbled run.

The majority of the gunfire was coming from the north, but judging from the condition of Luis’s men, they weren’t going to be able to make a push anytime soon.

All of the wounded had been gathered behind a steel silo, where the medic had his hands full trying to patch everyone up. Whatever evacuation there was wouldn’t arrive in time to save most of them. With fatal bullet wounds to the abdomens, legs, and chests, there would be more body bags than soldiers going home. Unless they were able to take the base quickly.

“Luis!” Alex said, shouting above the gunfire.

Luis dropped the empty magazine and reloaded, keeping his eyes on the targets ahead. “How the hell did you get in here?”

“Nelson.”

“I’m gonna kill that guy.” Luis squeezed off another few rounds and then joined Alex tucked behind one of the concrete walls.

“What’s your plan B?” Alex asked.

“It’s the same as plan A. Retake the refinery,” Luis answered, with puffs of concrete dust exploding just above both of their heads. The wall they used cover behind was starting to look more like a block of Swiss cheese than concrete.

“I might be able to help with that,” Alex replied. “How many grenades do you have left?”

“I need an ordinance check!”

The makeshift collection of grenades, claymores, and one RPG gave them a formidable collection, but they were only going to get one chance to make it work.

“We need misdirection. That’s the only way we’ll be able to throw them off,” Alex said. “They think we’ll do anything not to damage the structure of the facility, and they’re using that as much as they can to their advantage.” Alex picked up one of the grenades. “We need to change that.”

“No, we don’t. We can’t afford to lose this installation.”

Alex pointed to a few large cylinders in close proximity to the sentries. “Those tanks were reserved for other oil-collected substances, like petroleum jelly, which haven’t been filled in years. The refinery’s only productions now are gasoline and jet fuel. That’s why the sentries don’t care where they’re located, because they know we won’t use ordinance.”

“I need confirmation for that.”

It could have been the frustration of the day or the fact that he’d been locked up in a tank for almost twelve hours, but Alex grabbed Luis by the collar and pointed to the group of wounded soldiers that his overwhelmed medic was tending to. “You see that? You’re not going to have any men left in about ten minutes if you don’t do something. That’s your confirmation!”

Alex had always weighed a man by how he treated not just the men around him, but also the men under him. A leader understood objectives, but he also understood that objectives couldn’t be completed if everyone under his command was dead.

“Do it,” Luis said.

Alex gripped two grenades, one in each hand, pulled the pins on both, and held them tight. “Fire in the hole!” He chucked the two grenades as hard as he could to the empty structures next to the sentries.

The Class 3 sentries scrambled, caught off guard by the sudden change in tactics, and before all of them could retreat to a safer distance, the grenades detonated, sending a magnificent explosion of fire and steel into the Texas sky.

With the sentries now on their heels, Alex and Luis led the charge of men as they pushed forward, closer to the distillation center, keeping the pressure of chucking grenades while they still could, before they made it the area where they couldn’t afford that type of recklessness.

While most of the sentries retreated to the stronghold of the distillation center, two Class 3s refused to give up their position. The self-indignant defiance of running didn’t sit well with them, and they instantly became a thorn in the side for both Luis and Alex.

The smoke from the resulting fires hazed the line of sight and made it difficult for both sides. Alex was caught off guard by a vicious bout of hacking and coughing from the acrid smoke. He was separated from Luis and the remaining soldiers still healthy enough to continue the mission. He placed his hand on the pipe next to him to keep himself from keeling over, and he felt his hand hit a lump. When he looked up he saw that it was a C-4 explosive device.

“Luis!”

But with the two sentries still keeping up their relentless last stand, Luis couldn’t hear Alex shouting. And that’s when Alex noticed similar devices placed randomly at other locations. High above them, and down at their feet. Even if they were able to re-take the refinery, Gordon wasn’t going to let anyone else have it. Once the sentries determined that they could no longer hold the position, they were going to bury they place and entomb whoever was left inside.

“Ahhgg!” Luis screamed.

He’d been hit in the shoulder and collapsed to the ground, dropping his gun and clutching the wound, which bled profusely. A member of his team tried running toward him but was immediately taken down by a bullet to the head, leaving Luis alone, wounded, and under fire.

“Go!” Luis said, gesturing for Alex to run.

Alex peeked around the corner and got a good look at both sentries before his cover was blown and he had to duck back behind the piping. Both sentries had abandoned any sense of making it out alive and had positioned themselves next to one of the explosive devices Alex recognized. All he needed to detonate the explosive was to create a powerful enough shock to set off the detonator. A bullet wouldn’t do it, but the gas pressure from the surrounding pipes might do the trick. He gripped his rifle firmly, took a deep breath, and sprinted from his cover to Luis’s aid.

Flashes from Alex’s rifle struck like lightning as he focused the concentration of every bullet he fired into the cluster of pipes around the explosive the sentries were blatantly standing next to. The sights of his rifle bounced around the target over fifty yards away as Alex tried to steady himself on his sprint over to Luis.

Just before he made it to Luis, with bullets whizzing past him and the burn in his muscles, along with the line of concentration in his mind, reaching a fever pitch, the rifle and his arm went rigid, lining perfectly with the pipe right next to the patch of gray explosive just above the heads of the Class 3s. It was only a single bullet, but it was perfectly projected, and when it impacted the pipe, an explosion of pressure ignited the C-4, and the explosion that followed wiped out both sentries, and a volatile mixture of steel, fire, gas, and fuel flew into the air as pipes and support beams collapsed, burying what was left of the sentries in a metal tomb.

Alex grabbed Luis and propped his left arm over his shoulder. “This place is rigged to blow. We need to get the hell out of here.”

Both men hobbled forward, with Alex supporting the bulk of Luis’s weight. Alex kept his eye out for any sentry who might have tried to follow him, but he knew most of them had already evacuated the area, waiting for the final call from the two sentries left behind, who were now buried under a mound of steel. Once the other Class 3s realized what happened, they’d detonate the rest of the charges and crumble the entire compound to nothing but bits of dust.

Whoever wasn’t dead, but wounded, was still where they’d left them by the conversion unit. There were over twenty men who were barely holding on to their lives. There was no way any of them would be able to make it out of here on foot, and reinforcements were still who knows how far away.

“Wait here with your men,” Alex said, easing Luis down for him to rest. Luis winced, still clutching his shoulder, which had yet to properly clot from the bullet wound.

“What are you doing?” Luis asked.

“The trucks are still parked on the perimeter wall.”

“You won’t have enough time. You’d have to drive all the way around to the front entrance to get inside.”

Alex grabbed a few of the spare claymores and firing wire the soldiers had brought with them. “I’ll make my own entrance.” Scraping the bottom of the well for whatever energy was left, Alex sprinted back through the container fields. He wasn’t sure how much time remained, but every second wasted was one more for the sentries to blow the refinery.

Without breaking stride, Alex catapulted himself over the wall and immediately collapsed to his knees on the other side, where he reached for the claymores. He plugged the wires into the fuse wells and planted the tiny, pronged feet into the dirt and nestled them right by the wall. He unrolled the wiring one hundred feet, covered his ears, and then hit the detonator switch.

Chunks of rock, concrete, and earth blasted into the air and rained down in hail-sized balls. The resulting gap was barely enough for the width of the truck, but Alex fired up the engine and barreled through. He kept the accelerator pressed to the floor and weaved around the different structures and piping, at times almost tipping the truck to its side from his speed and sharp turns.

Alex slammed on the brakes and the tires screeched to a stop right in front of the group of wounded soldiers. Those who had enough strength to at least carry themselves to the back of the transport immediately did so, while also trying to help their brothers-in-arms to safety.

“C’mon, c’mon, we gotta go!” Alex said, helping one of the soldiers into the back of the truck. Once everyone was loaded, Alex jumped behind the wheel, with Luis riding in the passenger seat next to him.

A cloud of black smoke ejected from the tailpipe as Alex turned around and headed back toward the wall. He wasn’t sure how far out the Class 3s placed the bombs, but he wanted to put as much distance between them and the explosions as he could.

The first explosive sounded from deep within the refinery, most likely centered in the distillation center, which triggered a chain reaction that pursued Alex with a fiery obsession that only took a few seconds to catch up with him, culminating in the tanks around him exploding.

Alex swerved the truck hard right, then left, then right, dodging the random detonations. He was driving through a minefield, and there was no way to know where the next blast would occur.

The gap in the wall was in sight, and the heat from the blasts around them cooked the inside of the vehicle. Alex sped between two containers that detonated simultaneously, sending vibrations through the truck and shattering the glass along with his eardrums. The containers cracked open, which exposed the fuel inside and ignited from the incendiary blast, triggering another massive explosion that caused the top canopy of the truck to catch fire.

“Hang on!” Alex said, gripping the steering wheel tightly as the gap in the wall grew closer, and seemingly smaller than it had before. Alex lined up the truck as best he could, and as the five-foot-wide truck passed through the five-and-a-half-foot-wide hole, Alex could hear the scrape of concrete against metal as the left side of the truck skidded across the wall’s jagged edge with barely enough space to make it through.

Alex slammed on the brakes and quickly got out to help the wounded soldiers out of the burning truck before it consumed them. The explosions from the refinery continued to spread, as secondary explosions, caused from exposed pipes, gasses, and fuel, sent the refinery up in flames and smoke.

That refinery was the source where millions of gallons of crude oil were converted into usable fuel every year. It had taken years to construct that facility, and in one fell swoop, Gordon had leveled it to the ground in less than sixty seconds. That’s all it took. The burning refinery in front of Alex told him one thing: Gordon knew he was going to lose, and he was going to bring down everything around him.

Chapter 7

The room had been silent for almost an entire minute. The news of the events in Texas weren’t just devastating for the war, but also for the country. The images on the projector were those of ashes. With the inevitability of defeat approaching, Gordon had taken a scorched-earth policy, ordering his men to torch everything on their retreat back to Topeka. Gordon had now surrounded himself in a ring of fire, which was growing out of control.

“Fucking coward!” General Mears said, slamming his chubby fists into the table. The rest of the joint chiefs joined Mears in his frustration, and it wasn’t until Frizen spoke that the rest of the room finally calmed down.

“We’ve accomplished our objective,” Frizen said. “Gordon is completely cut off from the rest of the country. He has no supply routes coming into Topeka, and what’s left of his forces are there with him in the city. I need to know what our resources look like for the final push.”

General Mears did his best to compose himself, but the red in his cheeks had run so deep, it looked as though they would remain permanently stained that way. “The boots on the ground are tired but are still well stocked with supplies. Our biggest enemy besides Gordon right now is fatigue. But I’ll tell you this,” Mears said, pointing his finger at the burning images of towns, cities, and people, “there isn’t a soldier in the field right now who doesn’t see what Gordon’s doing. And there isn’t a soldier out there who isn’t foaming at the mouth to bring this bastard down.”

The rest of the joint chiefs nodded in agreement. Frizen had to brief the president in less than twenty minutes, and when he walked into the Oval Office to deliver the news of the loss of three refineries in Texas, as well as the devastation in Oklahoma City, Jackson, Mississippi, and countless others in the south, he wanted to make sure the president knew his military had a plan of action on how to end this reckless, trigger-happy tyrant’s tantrum.

“All I need to know from you, General, is that your men will be able to handle the situation,” Frizen said.

“Yes, sir. They will.”

“Very well. I’ll inform the president while we prepare for the invasion.”

Frizen tucked the stack of papers under his arm and headed out of the war room. The conflict was almost over, but they’d now reached the hardest push. There was a reason Frizen had wanted to cut off Gordon’s supply routes and choke him out: Topeka had tens of thousands of Coalition troops, and while Topeka didn’t have an extensive population that would create many civilian casualties, the men in those sentry uniforms were still citizens of this country. With the Coalition’s resources dwindling right in front of them, Frizen was hoping those individuals under Gordon would surrender. Many of his units gave up easily enough with every farm camp and community the soldiers invaded, but the closer they drew to Topeka, the more loyal Gordon’s men became.

It was there in Topeka where they were given the lavish comforts the rest of the country were denied. There were sentries and Coalition officials who lived better than the president, and without anyone knowing their names. But once the military road into Topeka had flipped the Soil Coalition over to expose its scaly underbelly, there wouldn’t be any other places for the creatures clinging to life underneath to hide. All they would be able to do is scurry off before the heel of a boot squashed the last bits of life out of them.

***

The tip of Gordon’s cigarette had worn down to the nub. His office had transformed itself into a smoky bar, complete with empty beer bottles and cans. A bottle of vodka lay on its side, slowly rolling back and forth in an ominous cadence on Gordon’s desk.

With the cigarette threatening to burn his skin, he finally snuffed it out in the massive pile of ashes that had gathered in the ashtray and left the nub to lie with its brothers in the growing graveyard Gordon had created.

Gordon watched the fading smoke waft into the air, clouding the room with a darkness and stench that soaked into the walls and floor and himself. Gordon placed his hands on the arms of his chair. Everything in the office was his, but for some reason it felt foreign, and anything that wasn’t familiar to him these days was burnt to the ground.

The smell of smoke and ash had spread beyond his office walls to the world outside. Every square mile his men gave up to the United States military was one more square mile of scorched earth he left its victors. If Gordon couldn’t control it, then he burned it.

There was a knock on the door, and Jake’s figure appeared through the cloudy haze. “I think Sydney’s stalling.”

Gordon reached for the open pack of cigarettes on his desk and pulled out the last one with the ends of his lips. “Of course he is. He knows once he’s done, I’m going to kill him.” He tilted his head to the side as his lighter torched the fag, and he took another long drag, letting the fire smolder in his throat and lungs. “But he also knows he’s the only one besides Todd Penn who can put that information together.”

“So you’re just going to let him play us like that?”

“What the fuck did you say to me?”

Gordon pushed himself off his ass and walked around the desk to where Jake stood and blew a puff of smoke straight into his face. Jake didn’t flinch, and Gordon didn’t expect him to. There wasn’t any doubt that Jake could kill Gordon if he wanted to. Fighting had never been his strong suit. Words were his gift. That was why he’d always surrounded himself with men like Jake and Dean. They were the blunt instruments with which he wielded his authority, and in turn he kept the instruments well tuned and content. And for the same reason Gordon wouldn’t kill Sydney, Jake wouldn’t kill Gordon. Because Jake knew that when the United States military came knocking, Gordon would be his only way out.

“I just don’t think it’s a good idea to make him believe that,” Jake answered, attempting to alter his tone but with the inclination of not trying very hard.

“That’s your job. Not mine.” Gordon returned to his seat and propped his feet up on his desk. Jake left to leave Gordon alone to continue his bonfire of carcinogens and shut the door behind him on his way out.

The laptop remained closed and at the corner of his desk, and Gordon had the sudden urge to fling it across the room. But he couldn’t. That computer was the one link to the outside world that offered him an escape route, and with Dean reporting to him that the military was beginning their final push toward Topeka, he just hoped that call would come sooner rather than later.

***

The smoke from the fires at the refinery had yet to slow its enthusiastic rise into the atmosphere, giving its very best to try to block out the sunlight above them. Nelson had estimated that nearly seventeen thousand barrels of oil would burn, raining a black ash over the surrounding area.

Alex stepped around the makeshift medical tents, attending to the wounded, and looked down at his arm, where the flakes of black had gathered. He smeared his fingers across the greasy specks, and they smudged into fat streaks against his skin. Alex grew more and more fixated on the streaks until he tripped over something that broke his concentration. When he looked down, he saw an exposed boot sticking out from under a tarp.

The ground that surrounded him was covered with at least twenty tarps of soldiers who had been killed and pulled from the wreckage of the refinery. Underneath each tarp was the face of a man who’d given his life for the cause of bringing the end of suffering to others. That was the underlying goal of the entire operation against the Coalition. The black ash covered the tarps in a speckled darkness, giving their forgone bodies the same level of bleakness as their eternal rest.

This is what Gordon wanted. There couldn’t have been any other reason for it but that. Whatever dark, twisted disease had consumed him wanted to spread, and the pandemic had begun.

“You’re making this harder on me.”

Alex turned to see Luis with his shirt off and a patch over his shoulder. As Alex took in the size of Luis, he was thankful the beating didn’t continue when they first met. What Luis lacked in height, he made up for in width.

“How’s the shoulder?” Alex asked.

“I’ll live. You helped save over thirty men today.”

“It should have been more.” Alex looked back down at the number of tarps over the bodies.

“I did that to them,” Luis said, lost in a trance, staring down at his fallen comrades. “I led, and they followed.”

“You did what you had to,” Alex replied.

“No. I rushed it.”

“They were going to blow that refinery no matter how many soldiers showed up, and no matter how long they held it. It was always going to come down.” Alex walked over and placed his hand on Luis’s good shoulder. His fingers slipped from the slick oil specks that rained over them.

It was appropriate, the shadowy haze they were all being blanketed with. It was a slow process, letting the darkness take you. It was barely noticeable it at first, just a few flecks here and there. It’s a light drizzle that you don’t think will amount to much, but after a while, it grows.

That’s what Gordon had done to the country. It had been nothing but a light drizzle of deceit for the past three years, but in that time, the face of the nation had changed. Piling up, day after day, week after week, month after month, was the steady rise of filth that came in the form of the communities where citizens were forced to labor at the cost of their freedom. It sprouted in farm camps where those who were deemed troublesome or guilty were sentenced to work off their indiscretions in the harshest conditions at the cost of their dignity. And it had caused more bodies to be buried and burned than lives it saved.

“I’m going to kill him,” Alex said, looking down at the thickening blackness on the tarps below them. Before Luis could say anything, Nelson came running up to the two of them, attempting to balance the laptop in one hand and smearing the black muck collecting on his glasses.

“Guys, I think I found them.”

Luis immediately snapped out of his stupor and snatched the laptop out of Nelson’s hands. “Where is she?”

Nelson tugged at the laptop and pried it from Luis’s grip. “They didn’t register them under any names, but I managed to trace two deliveries to farm camps in Topeka.”

“Are you sure it’s them?” Luis asked.

“I can’t be one hundred percent, but the timestamps are around the same times Emma and Todd would have arrived. And seeing that these two were the only pieces of data entered that didn’t have a name associated for that date, I’d say it’s safe to say it’s them.”

“How close are they to the capital?” Alex asked.

“Well, that’s where it gets tricky. They’re not in the same farm camp.”

“What?” Luis asked.

“Emma is stationed on the outskirts of the city, but Todd is stationed almost directly in the downtown district.”

Luis immediately left and headed for one of the trucks. Alex chased after him, but when he placed his hand on Luis’s shoulder, he jerked it away. “Luis, wait.” Alex jumped in front of him and forced him to a stop. “Listen. You’ve just been shot, and we’re in Texas.”

“Then I better leave now.” Luis smacked his non-wounded shoulder into Alex, knocking him out of the way, and when Alex grabbed Luis’s shoulder again, he twisted Alex’s hand off, almost breaking his arm in the process. “I have to get her back!”

“And how do you expect to do that? By yourself?” Alex asked, rubbing his hand, which felt like it had been broken in half. “There’s a reason the military saved Topeka for last. It’s a fortress.” Alex watched the realization wash over Luis as the sprinkle of black ash continued to cover them in a fine layer of charcoal. “Todd and Emma are there because of me. We’ll get them out together.”

Chapter 8

The rows of naked workers all had the same look on their faces: defeat. And the sentries holding guns and whips in their hands all had the same look on their own faces: hate. That’s what people had become reduced to. That’s what Todd had been reduced to.

Todd shuffled forward, carrying a basketful of strawberries down the line of hydroponic tanks to the storage bins where all the food he and the rest of his slave laborers picked would be packaged and sent to whatever was still left under the Coalition’s control, which Todd hoped wasn’t very much.

Unlike his coworkers, however, Todd’s ankles were shackled together, which severely limited his speed and ability to make it to the bins in the same amount of time as his nonrestricted brethren. The shackles were an excuse for the sentries to whip him, and the trickle of blood from the strips of opened flesh on his back left a trail of crimson on the floor of the farm camp.

The only events that played through his mind were those of the community in Wyoming. He kept looking back for anything he’d missed when he was talking to Alex. But in the end, he knew exactly what had happened. He let the urgency of the situation and the belief that everyone wanted to take down the Coalition as much as he did blind his decision making until it was too late. He was so focused on the end result that he was willing to sacrifice the integrity of the elements involved to get there. Which was exactly what the Soil Coalition did in the very farm camps where Todd was stationed.

Todd examined the sullen faces around him. The hollow cheeks, the pencil-thin arms and legs, the pronounced ribs ready to penetrate the very skin holding them in place. He wondered how long these people had been here. How long would he survive in here? There was no doubt that Gordon wanted him dead, but for whatever reason, he didn’t have the firing squad take him down after he was captured. Did Gordon want him to suffer more? Is that why he had been put in this place? Perhaps. Or maybe Gordon was waiting to see if the scientists were able to recreate his solution without him. Then, once it was confirmed they had what they needed, Todd would receive a bullet to the back of his head while on his way to drop off a carton full of berries.

There would be no ceremony for him after it was done. No burial. He would be scooped up, tossed into a pile of other worthless bones, and set ablaze. He wouldn’t get to see his wife again. He wouldn’t get to talk to his daughter anymore. The bastards wouldn’t even give him the opportunity to be buried next to her.

Todd suddenly became brutally aware of the circumstances of her death. He was transported back to the day she passed. She was so sick, her body ravaged by the effects of GMO-24, just like it had destroyed so many other children and elderly too weak to handle the strains of genetic mutations. Her intestinal decomposition had accelerated past the organ’s ability to process any type of food or nutrients. It didn’t matter what they fed her, her body just couldn’t handle it.

Todd had never spent so many hours in the lab leading up to that point. The moment he found out what was happening, he and Emma started working on a cure. But they just didn’t have enough time. And so Todd was faced with a choice. Let his daughter suffer through the slow, agonizing effects of starvation and dehydration, or relieve her of that burden.

The crate full of berries in Todd’s hands began to tremble as the strength in his arms gave out. She wasn’t much bigger than the box he was carrying now when it happened. She was so small. So weak and in so much pain. He just didn’t have enough time. He cursed the relentless hand of time that waited for no man or excuse. It just kept ticking forward, bringing with it the inevitable fate that befalls everyone. No parent should have to bury their child, and no parent should ever have the disgusting task of ending their child’s pain themselves.

He and Emma buried her the same day. The sentries weren’t as strict back then, and they were allowed a brief time of bereavement. Todd didn’t sleep for three days after he put his daughter in the ground. He didn’t eat. He simply watched the world around him continue in its decay. Just like his little girl, the world experienced a slow death. Brought to slaughter by some faceless enemy whose only goal was darkness.

But somewhere within those three days of sleepless misery, the faceless assailant began to take form. Todd could see the features pronounced more clearly the longer he was awake. Every second his mind and body grew weary was another stroke of the brush on the canvas, painting the masterpiece of death. The grim reaper himself was taking shape, and Todd reached out his hand to uncloak the beast underneath.

When Todd finally pulled back the hood, Gordon Reath’s face showed itself. He was the poster child for what happened. He was the face of the Coalition that had forced him to bury his own daughter. And in that moment, all the pain and apathy and fear and loss replaced itself with the honed, razor edge of purpose. One he hadn’t quit sharpening since that very day.

But now, all the tools he had used to wield the one weapon that could bring down the violent facades around him were gone. He no longer had a lab to mass produce his cure to the virus that now plagued the world. All he could do was watch as the virus harnessed the power of Todd’s cure to continue its conquest and stranglehold on everything he held dear.

Todd emptied the cart of strawberries into the bin and then returned to the hydroponic tanks to strip the plants bare of their yield. A man, probably no older than Todd, carried a bag of the nutrients used to keep the water in the tanks at a suitable level for growth. Todd watched the man’s knees buckle and bend, his frail body straining under the weight of the bag, until he stumbled and fell to the floor, spilling the opened sack onto the ground.

Terror struck the man’s face, realizing the calamity of what he’d just done and the repercussions that would accompany it. The sentries were already converging on him as the mindless zombies surrounding him stepped around the spilt nutrients as the man desperately tried to scrape them off the ground and return them to the bag.

The whip at the sentry’s side extended to the ground and dragged slightly behind him until he and his two crusaders of pain towered over the man.

“Please,” the man said, clasping his hands together, begging for any type of leniency that was pointless to ask for. “I can pick all of it up. I can fix this. Please.” The voice was panicked and filled with a desperate tone that accompanied inmates on death row, pleading their innocence to the stone-faced executioner who sharpened his axe.

The first lashing sliced the man’s shoulder, triggering a pool of red crimson to contrast over the pale-gray flesh. The man howled and crumpled to the ground, curling up into a ball, holding his thin arm up and exposing his palm to the sentries, repeating the words “stop” and “please” interchangeably and repeatedly. But the next quick crack of the whip that opened a gash on the man’s leg was the only answer he would receive from the brutes in front of him.

Todd rushed forward in awkward, restricted jolts, as the chains around his ankles only allowed him to travel so far before the metal cut into his skin, causing him to stumble. He managed to get his hands around the neck of the first sentry but was quickly placed on his back by another sentry and was administered the same whipping as the man he tried to save.

Lying there on the ground, feeling the harsh burn and sting of consequences rushing over him, Todd could see the confusion and pain spread across the man’s face. He couldn’t understand why Todd had risked his own well-being for the fruitless endeavor of trying to help him. But Todd didn’t do it for the man, he did it for himself. He needed to prove that no matter what the conditions, or how painful the consequences, he would continue the fight to show those around him that they are in control of their fate. They have the ability to stand up for what they believe in and challenge the harsh realities of the world around them. Even after everything that happened, Todd was still trying to show the people who were enslaved that they had a choice.  

***

With Nelson pinpointing the location of both Todd and Emma in separate farm camps, Luis begrudgingly accepted the fact that he couldn’t be in two places at once, and despite the gunshot he had received, he wasn’t going to forgo the opportunity to retrieve his sister, no matter what.

Alex admired the man. Luis was someone who valued family, brotherhood, and loyalty. He was the silent guardian in the background, only coming into action when called upon by those who needed him most.

Most of Luis’s men, along with the units they met up with the closer they moved to Topeka, had accepted Alex, and his previous acts of valor seemed to have forgiven him the debt of his betrayal. But there was still one who wouldn’t take his eyes off him.

“You’re one smug prick, you know that?” Ray asked. “You think you have everyone fooled with the hero act. But I know who you are. I know what you do.”

“I’m just trying to fix what I already broke.”

“I won’t let you get away with this.” Ray edged closer to Alex within the confines of the tank, and Alex kept a watchful eye on the pistol attached to Ray’s waist. “Did you tell Luis what happened to his sister when you came into town? I bet he’d be interested to know how you got her whipped. I bet he’d like to know that it was you who put her on that post.”

“Gordon had a gun to every member of my community. It wasn’t just your friends who were caught in the line of fire, Ray. It was mine too.”

The accusations and guilt were becoming too much. Alex knew what he’d done. He’d lived through it. The knife of betrayal was a blade he’d stuck in his own gut for a very long time, ripping apart his insides, feeling the taste of disgust fill his mouth.

“And who the fuck are you to make those types of decisions? You came into our community and played god! You chose your own people over mine!” Ray said.

There wasn’t a pair of eyes that weren’t looking at the two of them. Alex could feel the rage welling up inside. It was the same rage that was there the night he came back from Wyoming. It fueled him into a stratosphere he could never reach without it, and he was dancing dangerously close to the tipping point again.

“Enough!” Luis said, his words ending any potential for escalation between the two of them. “You want to help, Ray? Then focus on getting Todd and Emma back.”

Ray cast his eyes down, and Alex moved to the other side of the tank. The cramped space wasn’t doing anyone any good. “Where are we now?” Alex asked.

“Just entered Kansas,” Luis answered.

“I need some air,” Alex said and exited through the porthole at the top of the tank and sat outside. The tank was cruising along at forty miles an hour, and the wind whipped his face as he glanced at the familiar terrain of his state.

Then, in the distance, Alex saw it. It was the lone tree he’d come across so many times on his hunts. The barren branches twisted into the air, and the black trunk and bark contrasted against the blue sky. The tree had been dead for some time, but still it remained, waiting for the time when its roots finally released their grip on the earth beneath and collapsed to the ground.

With everything that happened, Alex wasn’t sure how much longer his own roots would be keeping him alive. The past weeks had only accelerated the decay spreading inside him for the past three years. It wouldn’t be long before his own roots unearthed themselves and were exposed to the light above.

The tree out there was alone. Still defying the odds of life by standing strong in a world where it was surrounded by nothing but death. Alex couldn’t help but feel the same way. The only difference between him and the tree was the fact that he was still more alive than dead. At least for now.

***

The map spread across the desk of Gordon’s conference room seemed to be shrinking. The cluster of dots that had once stretched from Mississippi to Wyoming had relocated to surround the city of Topeka, Kansas. Everything Gordon had left to his name was stationed just outside the city, surrounding him in a ring of guns, men, and artillery.

Dean had lost all sense of composure and had devolved back into whatever gorilla ancestry his family came from, beating his chest, grunting, howling that they were all going to die. Every other top-level sentry was in the same boat. Trying to figure out the best way to save themselves without having Gordon finding out and putting a bullet in their heads.

All of their voices and all of their shouts and screams and fears were nothing more than just white noise. It was a slow and steady constant in the background of Gordon’s mind, almost Zen-like, allowing him to concentrate on just how many lives he was willing to sacrifice to ensure his own safety.

Any Class 3s who still remained were stationed in the building with Gordon at all times. It was part of their agreement that wherever Gordon went they would as well, and receive whatever amnesty from whatever country decided to take him in.

Gordon’s eyes flickered over to his laptop on his desk. He wondered how many countries were now scrambling for offers. How many would be willing to risk the lives of their own military personnel to ensure that their country receives the biggest scientific breakthrough in over a century?

He’d sold it as best he could, telling the marvels of the product in the persuasive tone that only a former lobbyist could. It was odd for him, being back in that role, but he was amazed at how easy it was for him to slide back in. Even after three years, he was able to put it back on like an old coat. The collar may have been slightly frayed and the cuffs a little looser than he remembered, but it still fit. It seemed no matter how hard he tried to bury who he was, it always returned to the surface.

“Gordon!”

It was Jake who broke through the white noise. Gordon became aware of the entire room looking at him, all of them hunched over and eagerly awaiting what he thought of their plan—their desperate, plan.

“Did you hear them? The city is being surrounded. We need an exit strategy,” Jake said.

So this is what all the squabbling was for. They all wanted out, to make sure their own skins would remain on their bones.

“There is no exit strategy. We fight, or we die. There is no other choice for us,” Gordon said.

Gordon could already see the tide shifting toward betrayal and cowardice. They wanted to run, and since Gordon hadn’t built his empire on a foundation of loyalty and trust, he reverted to what had always worked for him in the first place: fear.

“And if any of you or any of the men under your command think surrendering or running is a viable option, you tell them this: they have been a part of this Coalition since the beginning. If we lose, they will not be pardoned. They will be put to trial and convicted of treason, crimes against humanity, and whatever other bullshit the court system will throw at them. And once they are convicted, which they will be, they’ll be sentenced to rot in a jail cell instead of the box in the ground where they’ll end up if they try and run.”

The white noise stopped. With Gordon’s message clear, the rest of the room emptied, and when the door closed, there was only Gordon and Jake, alone.

“You have something, right?” Jake asked. “You know that no matter how bad you think you’ve scared them, it won’t be enough for them to stay when the bullets start flying.”

Gordon rose from his seat at the conference room table and walked out the door. Jake rushed after him, scrambling down the hallway, leaning into his ear and whispering so anyone they passed couldn’t hear him.

“You don’t actually think you can win this, do you?” Jake asked. “Christ, Gordon, the sentries won’t be able to handle the amount of firepower coming their way. Not even the Class 3s.”

It was like an incessant bug, buzzing around Gordon’s ear, and no matter what, he just couldn’t swat it away. He entered his office and opened the laptop on his desk. Jake continued his circling, asking Gordon what he was doing, if he was crazy, if he understood that he would die if something wasn’t done.

“Enough!” Gordon snapped.

The buzzing ceased, and Gordon powered on the laptop, praying he would have any type of notification from the countries he petitioned. Russia, Brazil, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Greece, India, all with handsome offers of money and amnesty in their country in return for the soil data. But all of them were overlooked and ignored once Gordon saw the one name that surpassed the rest: China.

Sheng had finally opted to throw his hat in the ring, and while his offer was less substantial than some of the others, Gordon knew Sheng would actually be able to deliver.

“You still have those Class 3s on standby?” Gordon asked.

“Yeah, they’re over in the hangar, just like you asked,” Jake answered.

“And Sydney is still working on the soil data?”

“Yeah, but he’s still not done.”

“Tell the sentries I want to be ready to take off within the hour, and make sure Sydney has whatever he needs to finish his work packed in the same amount of time.”

Chapter 9

The president’s war room was oddly quiet. Frizen, along with the rest of the joint chiefs, could feel the ominous cloud hanging over all of them. Their forces and resources were all in place. They had boots on the ground and fighters in the air, and every single one of those guns was aimed at the stronghold of what remained of the Coalition’s forces in Topeka, Kansas.

None of the generals, including Frizen, had a problem with dismantling the Coalition brick by brick, but all of them understood that, despite how they felt, the people who worked for the Coalition, which was funded and created by the US government, were all American citizens. Once they received the all clear from the president, more American blood would splash against their soil, staining the earth red.

It wasn’t a decision the president had come to lightly. It wasn’t something any of them had come to lightly, but the lack of acumen over the past three years during Gordon’s reckless tenure as head of the Soil Coalition needed to end. The onus of the capture and trial of Gordon Reath rested on everyone in the war room. And they didn’t have anyone to blame but themselves.

Frizen rubbed the dryness out of his eyes and reached for the Styrofoam cup of cold coffee he’d been sipping since his arrival. The bitter taste flooded his mouth, and he could feel the slight burst of energy enter his bloodstream from the influx of caffeine. He never liked coffee, and it wasn’t something he ever felt like he needed, but the puffy bags under his eyes were a response to the long days stretching into longer nights he’d brooked for the past week.

The president entered the room, and Frizen and the rest of the joint chiefs snapped to attention. The president seemed to have been suffering from the same sleepless affliction that plagued the rest of them.

“Where do we stand, gentlemen?” the president asked.

“General Cooley has locked down the air space around Topeka, and all of General Mears’s men are in understanding of their assignments,” Frizen answered.

“What will be the main point of entry?”

“The bulk of the Coalition’s forces have positioned themselves on the west side of the city,” Mears answered. “That’s where the main point of conflict will take place. We have forces completely surrounding the city, which we don’t believe will cause us considerable resistance. Once we penetrate the west, we’ll have a clear line of sight to the heart of Topeka.”

“And what about Gordon?”

“We received confirmation an hour ago that the Chinese reached out to him with an offer,” Frizen said. “Now, we don’t have the details of that offer, but we believe Gordon will try and meet up for some type of exchange.”

“Have we reached out to the Chinese about this?” the president asked.

“We have, sir,” Frizen answered. “They’re denying any allegations that they’ve been in contact with Gordon.”

“You don’t think they’ll send forces over, do you?”

“No, Mr. President. I don’t believe Sheng is willing to risk an international incident over the data, but I do believe they’ll try and make something happen off the Canadian coast between Alaska and Washington. Neither the Canadians nor us have any type of naval presence in that area.”

The president leaned back in his chair. He closed his eyes and rubbed his palms on his forehead until the skin turned red and raw. Frizen could tell that the president was weary, worn, and frail.

The president had been the one to appoint Gordon into the Soil Coalition during its formation, and he’d been the one to approve all the executive orders that granted Gordon as much power as he had. The war-weary look was from a man who had battled everything to try and bring an end to the very monster he created.

“Gentlemen,” the president said, “today we are dismantling not just the Coalition, but the line of thought that created it. Once this is done, I will be resigning from the presidency and will give a brief to the solicitor general of my involvement during the Coalition’s formation, as well as the cover-up of GMO-24. The country has experienced enough of my failures, and I will stand ready to receive the consequences.”

This was the first open acknowledgement of what most of the room already knew, and a moment of shock and silence followed the president’s statement as the rest of the room processed what was said. Then, one by one, each of the generals in the room rose and saluted, a final sign of respect to their commander-in-chief.

***

It wasn’t like anything Alex had ever seen in his entire life. The number of military personnel, tanks, trucks, and aircraft all seemed too surreal. It was an odd mix of admiration and disgust that swirled around him. The admiration of the sheer might of his country’s military prowess and the disgust that it took so long for them to use it.

Deep down, Alex knew there was more to it than he understood, but with everything that was swirling about in his head, it was hard to focus on what those elements were. He shook his head and focused on finishing loading the magazine in his hand. Despite his optimism that the sentries would drop their weapons after the first wave, he wanted to make sure he’d have enough ammo in case they didn’t.

And besides, the main objective of the military was to capture the capital. The farm camps were a secondary measure, which both Alex and Luis had decided to make their primary focus. With the aid of Nelson and the military insight that Luis was able to bring from his superiors, the three of them had managed to come up with a strategy that would give them a good chance of making sure both Todd and Emma came out alive.

Ray had chosen to accompany Alex and seemed just as likely to put a bullet in the back of Alex’s head as he was to forgive him. But Alex knew how close Ray was with Todd, and an extra gun wouldn’t hurt the cause.

Both Alex and Luis would be embedded with a small unit of soldiers infiltrating the same grid where both Todd and Emma’s farm camps were located. While the two were allowed to tag along, both were thoroughly instructed, at least six times, that the unit they were tagging along with could neither guarantee their safety nor help them with the extraction of the two individuals they were seeking. Every soldier’s mandate on that field was to take the capital, extract the soil data, and make sure they nabbed Gordon before he could take off anywhere. As badly as Alex wanted to be a part of the group that took Gordon out, he owed a greater debt to Todd.

It was an odd feeling, being this close to the front lines on the eve of such an historic battle. All the killing and hunting he’d done before felt different from how this felt. All the fights and battles up to this point had been filled with a reckless rage he hadn’t been able to control. But this—this was calculated, this had a goal bigger than the satisfaction of his own revenge.

A sergeant drove through the units, notifying the soldiers of the time left on everyone’s dwindling clock. “Two minutes! Two minutes!”

Alex managed to finish loading one more magazine, which brought his total to six. He pulled on the Kevlar one of the units had loaned him and picked up his rifle.

The fact that he was surrounded by a group of soldiers who had seen combat before gave him a boost of confidence. All he wanted to do was grab Todd and get him out. Alex looked around for Ray, and just before the lieutenant in charge of their platoon marched the first few steps toward war, he popped up behind him.

Those next two miles seemed to crawl and stretch forever. Each time Alex set his foot down, he felt as though his life were shortening. There was a finality that grew the closer he moved to the edge of conflict. He wasn’t sure what the finality meant, but he did know the answer lay just over the horizon.

Alex kept just to the right of the tank, using it as a protective barrier as he scanned the north end, where Todd’s farm camp was stationed. The rumble of the tank tracks was interrupted by the gunfire from the first unit of sentries they came across. The rolling hills in front of them suddenly became alive with screams and the thundering explosions of artillery.

The air quickly grew thick with lead. Two soldiers to Alex’s right had already succumbed to the fire of war, their lifeless bodies collapsing to the dirt while a medical officer rushed to their aid.

The tank tracks slowed, and Alex crouched lower, keeping the barrel of his rifle up and looking for anything to shoot at, but the number of bodies on the field was overwhelming. Alex could feel himself hesitating. The end of the barrel moved from one sentry to another, each time he failed to pull the trigger after seeing the flashes of another barrel right next him. His palms grew sweaty on the rifle’s grips, and he could feel his breathing accelerate along in time with his heart rate.

A mortar exploded a few feet in front of him, sending Alex onto his back and flinging the rifle from his hands. The impact sent a rain of dirt into the air and down on Alex, covering him in a gray ash. Everything was spinning. The loud bass of the mortar’s impact left his body vibrating and shaken.

Alex rolled onto his stomach. The boots of men passed him as the bullets overhead continued their perforation. He could see his rifle’s stock buried in a pile of ashy earth. It was a few feet behind him, and he had to watch his hands to keep them from being crushed by the endless march of boots. Once the forest of legs had cleared, he pushed himself to his knees, when a foot slammed into his stomach and knocked him backwards.

“Fucking coward,” Ray said, sending another kick into Alex’s side. Luckily for Alex, the Kevlar had absorbed most of the blows.

Alex rolled quickly to his right, still disoriented from the previous hit, but evaded another vicious kick from Ray and managed to get to his feet. “Stop, Ray.”

Ray dropped his rifle and ran, full sprint, into Alex, sending both of them to the dirt. The two rolled over a few times, until Ray finally planted himself on top, but Alex gripped both of Ray’s wrists in his hands, restraining him.

“I won’t let you be the one who finishes him off!” Ray said, his face turning a shade of purple from the amount of effort it took for him to try and free himself from Alex’s grip.

Using the leverage he had on Ray’s arms, Alex rotated his arms, legs, hips, and torso to the left, which brought enough force to slam Ray to his side, where Alex pinned him down, and he pulled his sidearm and placed it to Ray’s forehead. “Listen to me! I know what I did, all right? Now, I swear to you, there are no other games or sides I’m trying to play.”

Even with the gun to his head, Ray refused to end his resistance, still attempting to push Alex off him. Alex felt the rage in him return. It was the same bloodlust that had consumed him the night he killed the sentries in his community. It boiled over, and Alex’s finger inched over the trigger, his entire body tense.

“Do it!” Ray said.

Alex removed his finger from the trigger and pushed himself off Ray, holstering the pistol. The tanks and trucks were a few hundred feet in front of them now, continuing their steady march to Topeka’s heart. “I’m going to get him out, Ray.”

***

“I need a medic up here now!” Luis yelled, placing his hands over one of the men who had collapsed with a bullet to the gut. The warm ooze of fluids squished between his fingers as the medic dropped to his knees to take over for Luis.

Once the medic had the hands he needed, Luis picked his rifle back up and rejoined the men taking the farm camp. A stack of sentries were positioned at the front door and kept a steady stream of bullets aimed in their direction. The use of any heavy artillery had been prohibited to eliminate any collateral damage.

Three armored trucks and a tank surrounded the farm camp, but any attempt to step away from the protection of their armored escorts was met with fatality, and the field of bodies between the trucks and the farm camp had grown substantially.

Luis found the lieutenant in charge of the platoon. “We need to get the tank closer!”

“We’d be in grenade range, sir!”

“Then we’ll throw them back!”

The young lieutenant ordered his tank forward. Luis, along with twenty other soldiers, filed closely behind. The bullets ricocheted off the heavy armor. The concerto of war that was the rapid beat of metal on metal was a piece of music Luis had become familiar with. But what made this song so lethal was the crescendo, which revealed some new type of horror every time it was played.

The front entrance was only twenty yards away, and just as the lieutenant suspected, the first grenade landed three soldiers in front of Luis. While the rest of them scattered, Luis stepped on his horse and sprinted toward the grenade, palmed it on the run, then chucked it back to the farm camp’s entrance, where it detonated.

Any of the sentries who didn’t get wiped out in the blast retreated back into the farm camp. Luis turned around to the soldiers still in shock from his throw. “C’mon!”

Luis was the first man through, and the inside of the camp was completely pitch black. He lowered his night-vision goggles and turned them on.

The room morphed into a sea of green. The bodies of the dead and maimed sentries littered the ground, and Luis did his best to avoid losing his footing on the blood-soaked floor. The entrance was a short hallway, which opened up into the larger warehouse-like room where the bulk of the plants were grown and the majority of the farm workers would be.

The closer Luis moved to the opening of the hydroponic farm inside, the quieter it became. He could see the thin, frail bodies of the workers all hunched in a corner, shivering and silent. He stopped right before the entrance and signaled the men behind him to do the same. He looked around, searching for where the other sentries may have gone, but couldn’t see them.

Then, on the second level above them, a flash of light blinded Luis, and he ripped the goggles off his face as he felt a blast of heat overtake him. When he turned around, the inside of the warehouse was on fire, and the workers inside were scrambling to escape.

“Emma! Emma!” Luis called, sprinting into the blaze. Half the workers inside were paralyzed with fear, and the other half ran aimlessly through the building in a wild panic. Luis turned to the men following him and pointed to the surrounding chaos. “Grab as many of them as you can and get them out. Now!”

The team hurried to action, cutting through the flames and attempting to quell both the fires and the panic inside. Luis searched frantically for Emma, trying to distinguish her features from the flashes of faces rushing past him and the rising flames that consumed the building.

The farm camp was massive, with hundreds of workers attempting to flood out of whatever exits were close. Luis scanned the second floor of the building, trying to see if Emma was working there, but the smoke was becoming too thick.

“Help!”

Luis followed the cries, searching through the rising flames for the source. The long wooden tables holding the hydroponic tanks had tipped over, forming torched hurdles in his path. He took a few steps back, got a running start, and with the extra thirty pounds of gear on his back, he barely made it over the flames, rolling to his side on the other end.

One of the light fixtures broke loose from the wire holding it in place and crashed to the ground next to him, covering him in a mixture of embers and dirt. He patted the small fires out on his chest as the cries for help continued. Luis leapt to his feet, following the sound and dodging the flames devouring everything around him.

Then, down one of the aisles between a pair of tanks, Luis saw Emma with her shoulder under the arm of an elderly woman, dragging her forward in attempt to outrun the flames. Luis dashed down the aisle, catching both Emma and the woman as they collapsed. “Hang on, I’m gonna get you out of here.” Luis scooped up the old woman in his arms, and Emma held on to his shoulder for support as the walls of flames closed in on them.

The massive fire hurdles had multiplied tenfold, and Luis knew he wouldn’t be able to make the jump with the frail woman in his arms.

“We need another way out!” Luis said.

Both he and Emma hacked and coughed as the smoke grew thick in the air. The heat was sweltering, making it feel like Luis’s skin was slowly dripping off his bones.

“There!” Emma said, pointing to a side door.

“C’mon!” Luis said.

More tables and hanging light structures collapsed, weakened from the intense heat. Luis looked down at the old woman, now unconscious in his arms. He wasn’t sure she was even alive anymore. The door was blocked by one of the fallen tables, and Luis laid the woman down and rushed to clear the path.

Luis’s hands gripped the burnt, hot ends, which seared his flesh as he lifted the table and tossed it aside and into the encroaching flames. With his hands still red and blistering, he picked up the woman and shoulder-checked the door open as he tumbled outside into the fresh air and surrounding gunfire.

The soldiers had managed to push the sentries back, deeper into Topeka, but there were still a few lingering sentries. Luis stripped off his shirt and handed it to his sister to cover herself. He wrapped her in a hug and the two wheezed, both still lightheaded from the smoke inhalation.

“I wasn’t sure if I’d see you again,” Luis said.

“Me either,” Emma replied.

Luis pushed her back slightly to get a good look at her. “Are you all right?”

“Todd. Where is he?”

“There’s a unit getting him out right now.”

Emma let out an exhale and then collapsed back into Luis’s arms. He looked over at the old woman, still lifeless on the ground. He let go of his sister and placed his fingers on the side of the woman’s neck. She still had a pulse and was breathing, just barely. He flagged down a medic and a transport and piled both the woman and Emma inside, taking them away from the front lines.

Luis rode in the back with Emma, keeping his arm around her and the rough blanket that was used to replace Luis’s shirt to cover her up. He looked out the back, his chin resting on top of Emma’s head as he watched the combined efforts of the marines, the army, and the navy as they pushed the sentries back. It wouldn’t be much longer until they occupied the city. But for Luis, the fight was done.

***

“Grenade!” Alex yelled, jumping behind the wheel well of one of the armored trucks as the explosive detonated, sending a blast of energy that crumpled the metal armor on the other side of the truck. The adrenaline coursing through Alex’s veins was still going strong, but he wasn’t sure how much longer it would last.

Alex poked his head over the hood of the truck and could see the farm camp where Todd was housed. It was right between both sides, who had seemed to come to a stalemate within the city limits. The soldiers Alex was with had backed the sentries up against the wall, which gave the sentries only two options: kill the soldiers or die.

“Is that where Todd is?” Ray asked, shouting above the gunfire.

Alex nodded and then reexamined how the hell he was going to get inside, but before he had a chance to come up with a solution that didn’t involve running through the firefight with nothing but blind luck, Ray took off at a sprint toward the farm camp.

“Ray!”

But it was too late. The man was already halfway across the field. Alex cursed under his breath then looked up inside the cab of the truck next to him, which shielded him from the grenade. The keys were still inside, so he crouched around to check the damage on the side of the blast. The doors were bent, but the tires and axles checked out all right.

Alex jumped behind the driver’s seat, and when he looked out onto the field, he could see Ray’s lifeless body lying in the dirt. He floored the accelerator and kept himself crouched low behind the dashboard so only his eyes peeked over the top.

The farther Alex drove, the more intensely the rain of bullets peppered both sides of the truck and started splintering the windows until the passenger-side glass finally gave way and burst into broken shards. Alex pulled the truck to the right, protecting Ray’s body from any more enemy fire, and jumped to the ground beside him.

Blood gushed from Ray’s right arm and the right side of his stomach, and he had placed both his shaking hands over the wounds. His entire body convulsed from shock.

“You have to get him,” Ray said, coughing up blood. “You have to get him out.”

Alex scooped his arms under Ray with a coordinated, strained effort from the rest of his muscles, lifted him off the ground and laid him across the backseat. “Hang on, Ray.” Luckily, the soldiers on their side had ceased fire, allowing Alex to get Ray out, but the bullets from the sentries continued their vicious assault as Alex hightailed it back to the front lines.

Both Alex and Ray bobbled and shook as the truck rumbled forward, flying over bumps and hills, and dodging the bullets that were now flying in through the shattered back windshield. Alex skidded to a stop with the hood smoking. The medic pulled Ray, now unconscious, out of the back.

Alex jumped back behind the wheel of the truck, and one of the soldiers rushed over to him. “Sir, what are you doing?” Alex cranked the engine to life, and a puff of black smoke ejected from the tailpipe.

“I’m getting those people out of the farm camp. Cover me.”

The engine whined as it came to life, and the tires spun out in the loose dirt, gaining traction the farther he drove. Using the left side of the building as cover from the sentries, Alex got the truck as close to the front of the building as he possibly could and slammed on the brakes before smashing into the structure.

Alex looked behind him and could see the soldiers concentrating fire into the sentries. The only entrance was at the front, which was a good one hundred feet from the safety of the corner that protected Alex from the exchange of lead. Finally, he sprinted toward the entrance, kicking dirt up behind him, and he slid into the entrance feet first, with the barrel of his rifle pointed forward, ready to shoot any sentries who may have been stationed inside, but was greeted only by darkness.

The metal structure caused the gunfire outside to echo ominously within the walls of the farm camp. Alex took a few light steps forward, his eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness as he made his way through the front-entrance hallway.

Each step forward was full with anxiety-filled anticipation. Aside from the thunder of gunshots outside, the farm camp was quiet. With his eyes finally adjusting to the darkness, Alex could see the faint glow of the hydroponic tanks at the end of the hallway.

The structure was large, and the dim lighting only allowed Alex to see twenty feet in front of him. But the quiet felt odd. He couldn’t hear anything. No breathing or the shuffle of feet. Nothing.

Alex began to panic. Maybe this was the wrong farm camp. Maybe they had moved everyone, or worse. No. Todd was in there somewhere. He knew it. Alex took the first step inside and pivoted to the back wall, using the sights on his rifle to help him segment and scan the area in blocks.

The aerators from the tanks, bubbling the water inside, gave off a constant hum. The deeper he went into the camp without any sign of the workers or sentries inside, the faster his heart beat. He could feel a black hole ripping through him. If he couldn’t get Todd back, then everything he had tried to do would have been in vain.

All the betrayal, all the pain he caused Todd and his friends and family, the hundreds of hours he spent trying to solve the soil crisis would be for nothing. Alex couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t let a man who’d made his mission in life to bring the rest of humanity out of the pits of hell die in a place like this.

Alex had his rifle raised, and something dripped from above and splashed his arm. It looked dark in the fading glow of the hydroponics lab, but he couldn’t tell what it was. Then another drip landed on his arm, then his shoulder, his forehead. It felt warm against his skin, and when Alex brought the tip of his finger to wipe the drip rolling down the bridge of his nose, he felt his body run cold. It was blood.

Alex lifted his head slowly as the drops continued to fall over his face, and the very first thing he saw were the soles of the farm camp workers hanging from above. Dozens of bodies hung in the air with hooks dug into their backs and their flesh extended from the body.

Alex bent over with his hands on his knees, forcing the contents of his stomach back down his throat. He spit on the ground, trying to rid his mouth of the taste of rotten bile. He wiped his lips and forced himself to look up at the lifeless bodies, hanging from the rafters. He pulled out his flashlight and started scanning the faces.

Each face Alex lit up, he felt his heart drop into the pit of his stomach. The pained, hollow expressions the light exposed were the final moments of a life that was consumed with agony. If Gordon was sending everyone a final message, then Alex heard it loud and clear.

Then, when Alex shone the light on one of the faces, the eyes squinted, shielding themselves from the brightness. Not all of them were dead. Alex clicked on his radio. “We need men in the farm camp now!”

Gunfire and a panicked voice from the lieutenant echoed in his ear, “We’re moving as fast as we can!”

Alex used the beam of his light to follow the length of the chains that kept the bone-thin workers suspended in midair. The chains were attached to a catwalk. Just before Alex rushed to the stairs, the light ran across the bearded face of a man he recognized. His body was slowly rotating, spinning in midair as the blood from the puncture wounds on his back trickled a small waterfall of blood to the floor.

Alex leapt the stairs to the second story two at a time. The thump of his boots against the metal catwalk where the bodies were hung thumped in rhythm with the bullets firing beyond the walls, outside. He found the chains with Todd’s body and pulled, the muscles along his legs, back, and arms burning with every inch he brought Todd closer to the ledge.

Alex watched Todd’s skin tug and tear the closer he moved his body to the top. Tired moans of pain escaped Todd’s mouth with each jerky motion of the chains in Alex’s hands. With Todd’s body now dangling just on the edge of the catwalk, Alex grabbed hold of his arms and pulled him onto the sliver of metal. Afraid of further damaging Todd’s back, Alex didn’t touch the hooks. 

“Todd? Can you hear me?” Alex asked.

Downstairs, the soldiers from outside flooded the first floor of the building, their flashlights jerking in the darkness, searching for any sign of life.

“Up here!” Alex shouted, waving his arm. The soldiers below hurried up the steps while Alex kept hold of Todd. “Hang in there. You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be all right.” Alex repeated the words, almost saying them more to himself than to Todd. The war was coming to an end, and Alex hoped that by getting Todd out of the hellhole he put him in, a weight would be lifted off his shoulders. So he waited, waited for that feeling to come. But as the soldiers around him pulled up the rest of the workers dangling from the chains and hooks, he wondered if it would ever happen.

Chapter 10

The chopper touched down in the street just outside the town hall where the Soil Coalition’s headquarters used to reside. Frizen was the first of the joint chiefs to step out and make his way up the steps, with General Mears and General Cooley flanking him on either side.

The rest of the city was a mixture of bodies and smoke. Once the military pierced the western line and made it into the heart of the city, what sentries remained quickly surrendered. And when Frizen learned why, he insisted on visiting Topeka personally.

“We didn’t have any indications of any flights taking off during the fight,” Cooley said as he followed Frizen down the twisting hallways of the worn city hall.

“And we’re sure Gordon didn’t possess any type of stealth craft or was working on any project that could have afforded him such an escape?” Frizen asked.

“I am one hundred percent confident that he did not leave through the air, Admiral.”

“There was a break in our northern lines during the battle,” General Mears said. “I think Gordon drove his way out of here.”

“Then I want every available asset tracking him down and finding out where he is and where he’s headed,” Frizen said.

“I have men already on it,” Mears answered.

Frizen came to a stop outside a door that had charred burn marks scorched on the outside edges. A team dressed in white hazmat suits scanned the wreckage for anything that wasn’t destroyed. One of the workers saw the admiral and immediately called everyone to attention.

“At ease, Sergeant,” Frizen said, giving the man a salute. “What have you got for me?”

“He wiped everything, Admiral. We’re taking what hard drives we think we might be able to salvage back to the lab, but it’s a long shot we’ll be able to pull anything off of them.”

“And nothing on the servers?”

“No, not yet.”

“Very well. Keep me updated if you find anything of interest.”

“Yes, sir!”

The sergeant went back to his work, and Frizen stepped over a broken computer screen and back into the hallway, where the faces of Mears and Cooley mirrored his own fears. Gordon escaped, and he still had the soil data. “General Mears, we need to find Gordon before he leaves the country.”

General Mears took off and was then replaced by an out-of-breath corporal who did his best to retain his composure and extended a message to the admiral. Frizen’s jaw slowly dropped as Cooley waited eagerly to see what he was reading. Frizen crumpled the piece of paper up and grabbed the boy by the shoulders. “Who knows about this?”

“Only the doctors, immediate family, and a few of the men who were part of the rescue mission, sir.”

“You tell Commander Luis that no one but me is allowed to see him, and I’m leaving for their location immediately.”

The soldier nodded then quickly dashed back down the hallway. Frizen looked back into the charred lab next to him and let a small fountain of hope well up inside of him. As long as Todd Penn was alive, they still had a chance at fixing this.

***

The air grew cold, and Gordon fastened the top button of his coat as he stepped out of the vehicle and onto the wide-open tundra that was North Dakota. He rubbed his legs, attempting to loosen the aching stiffness that had grown over the past sixteen hours. “Christ, this place is a fucking hellhole.” Even before GMO-24, Gordon didn’t think this place would grow anything other than calluses on his feet. Jake climbed out of his vehicle and joined him in the arid cold.

Almost all of the trucks were riddled with bullet holes and cracked windows. The Class 3s who escorted Gordon and Jake pulled a few of the dead bodies from the previous battle out of the truck and dumped them on the ground. The escape from Topeka had proven slightly more difficult than anticipated.

The head of the Class 3 unit, Jay Kriken, looked over to Gordon as the last body was pulled from the caravan. Kriken was the most dangerous sentry Gordon ever brought into the Class 3 program. He had the mind of a sociopath with the face of a big-screen actor, which offered the illusion that he wouldn’t slice your throat then rip the skin from your skull. “What do you want to do with the meat sacks?”

“I just want them hidden,” Gordon answered. “The military will be out in full force looking for us, and I don’t want to leave any breadcrumbs for them to pick up. Just don’t bring any attention to yourself.”

Kriken nodded and gave the bodies a slight kick with his toe. A small rock formation was just to their left, and he rolled them in that direction, motioning for a few other sentries to assist him.

Gordon enlisted the protection of thirty of the best Class 3 sentries in the Coalition. They were the top one percent of the top one percent. Gordon was surrounded by some of the deadliest and most ruthless men on the planet.

The only downside to having a team like the one Gordon had was they could only be controlled as long as Gordon had something to offer them, and with the entire might of the United States military looking to hunt them down and kill them, Gordon’s offer of freedom and wealth was enough to keep them in line. At least for now.

“You really think Sheng will come through?” Jake asked.

“He better. Because the alternative is joining those bodies in the rocks over there,” Gordon answered, then looking back to the car he added, “See if he needs a bathroom break. I don’t need him making a mess, with all the ground we still have to cover.”

Jake opened the back door of the truck and grabbed Sydney by his collar, who was bound with rope at his wrists with a gag stuffed in his mouth, and pulled him out of the vehicle. He landed on the hard ground with a crack, followed by a muffled moan. Jake picked him up, forced him into a standing position, and yanked the gag out of his mouth.

“You don’t have to be so rough,” Sydney said, rotating the shoulder that received the blunt force of the impact.

“Well, if you had finished your job, we wouldn’t be here in the first place,” Gordon said. “So shut the fuck up!” A large puff of vapor roared from Gordon’s mouth from the cold air. “You better hope the Chinese don’t have a better scientist than you, because if they do, I’m going to let Jake treat your body like a punching bag, and then I’m going to hand you over to the Class 3s so they can use you for target practice until you bleed out.”

Gordon gripped the back of Sydney’s hair and tossed him forward, letting Jake walk him out onto the frozen ground. When Sydney dropped his pants, the sentries started to laugh.

“Don’t let your balls get too close to the ground!” Kriken roared, clutching his stomach.

Gordon kicked the ground with the toe of his boot. The impact sent a pain up through his entire leg. He took in the landscape around him, wondering if he’d ever see anything that was truly alive again.

***

The nurse rolled Todd to his side and checked the bandages on his back. He could feel the tape peeling off his skin and the air brush across the punctures from the hooks. The nurse gave a few approving groans, while he heard Emma gasp, and then the nurse taped the bandages back in place.

“So far so good, Mr. Penn,” the nurse said. “We’ll probably only keep you here another day, and you should be free to go.”

Emma, who hadn’t left his side, gave him a kiss on the cheek as the nurse disappeared. Free to go. It was a simple phrase, one Todd hadn’t heard in a long time.

“How are you feeling?” Emma asked.

“I’m good.”

Todd forced a smile and then kissed Emma’s hand. All of it seemed too surreal. The Coalition was gone, he was alive, his wife was alive, and now they could continue their work, finish what they started and begin the process of rebuilding what they’d lost.

But Todd knew that, unlike the cuts on his back, there were some wounds that would never heal. He was alive, but his daughter wasn’t. Of all his failures, of all his fallacies, that was the one that haunted him most.

“What’s wrong?” Emma asked.

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not fine. What is it?”

He looked into the face of his wife, searching for the life raft in the endless ocean he was struggling to stay afloat in. In those eyes he’d always found solace.

“It took me too long,” Todd said, his lips quivering and his face twitching in anticipation of the tears trying to make their way down his cheeks.

“What did?”

“To save our daughter.”

Emma wrapped her arms around Todd, and he buried his face into her shoulder. His hands dug into her back and hung on for dear life as wave after wave of sobs escaped him. Three years of grief poured out of him, anguish-filled moments he’d kept to himself in private filled the small hospital room, where the one person who understood and felt the same type of pain was with him.

It wasn’t fair. That was a phrase he hadn’t let himself utter in all the time since the beginning of the journey he set himself on. With everything he needed to accomplish, there wasn’t any room for self-pity. But now, sitting at the end of the road, his resolve had finally broken.

It wasn’t fair that their daughter died. It wasn’t fair that they couldn’t mourn properly. It wasn’t fair that all of their work had been taken from them. It wasn’t fair that they had suffered so much. It wasn’t fair that they had to experience so much pain.

Todd cried into Emma’s shoulder until the well ran dry. Once he was done, he wiped his tears until the red, puffy eyes were the only pieces of evidence that remained of his sobbing.

Emma placed one hand on each of his cheeks and looked him dead in the eyes to make sure he heard her. “You did not fail.”

Todd grabbed hold of that life raft, and he felt his body relax. That’s how the two of them had made it this far. Whenever one of them needed the pillar of strength to grab hold of, the stronger partner allowed them to hang on. Neither of them would have survived if they didn’t have each other. He didn’t have to struggle against the ocean currents alone.

A knock at the door broke their embrace, and Todd gave a smile as Nelson, and Luis walked into the room. “Hey, guys.”

“How are you feeling?” Nelson asked.

“Better. I’m glad you guys made it out all right. How’s everyone else back at the community doing?”

“Good,” Nelson said. “It was only another day before Luis showed up after you were taken. Ray’s still in surgery, but the doctors say he’ll make it out all right.”

“It’s good to see you alive and well, Todd,” Luis said, shaking Todd’s hand.

“I can’t thank you enough, Luis. We couldn’t have done this without you.”

“Hey, I’m just the muscle. You’re the brains. You just tell me where to show up, and I’m there.”

Another knock at the door turned the rest of their heads, and Admiral Frizen filled the doorframe. Luis immediately saluted, and Frizen waved him off. “At ease, Commander.” Frizen walked over to Todd’s bed and extended his hand. “It’s nice to finally meet you in person, Professor Penn.”

“I suppose it’s you I have to thank for all of this,” Todd said, gesturing around the private hospital room.

“Well, I wanted to make sure the greatest mind in the country had plenty of time to rest. And I see you’re making good use of it,” Frizen replied, smiling to the others in the room. “But I’m afraid this isn’t a social call, Professor. I had something I needed to discuss with you. We didn’t capture Gordon Reath during the raid in Topeka. We have people working on locating him now. But he did manage to erase all of your data, and he took a scientist with him who had been working on recreating your solution.”

“Where does he think he can go?” Luis asked.

“Our intelligence informed us that he has had several meetings with the Chinese president. We believe he’s going to exchange the professor’s work for amnesty in their country. Professor, I need to know the likelihood that the Chinese will be able to replicate your data into a viable solution.”

“Gordon has everything he needs. All it would take would be someone who had a solid background in biochemistry, and they’ll have what they want,” Todd answered.

“What’s the timeline we’re looking at?” Luis asked.

“NORAD is tracking any flights around the country, so we think he’s driving to the West Coast, where he’ll rendezvous with a Chinese group in twenty-four hours.”

“The West Coast is a big place,” Alex said. The entire room turned to look at him, and Luis had to grab Emma before she punched Alex in the face. “I think you’ll need all the help you can get.”

Chapter 11

Before Emma had a chance to unleash whatever wrath coursed through her veins onto Alex’s body, he exited the room and let the rest of them talk it over. Regardless of their decision to include him, he would be tagging along one way or another. But it would be easier for him to find and kill Gordon with the resources of the United States military.

Luis was the first one out of the room, followed by Nelson and Admiral Frizen. All of them were silent, casting their judgments over Alex and of all the things he’d done.

“They want to speak with you alone,” Luis said. Alex stepped forward, and Luis put out his arm to stop him before he passed. “I know why you did what you did. But if I hear one decibel of something I don’t want to hear in that room, I will end you. Do I make myself clear?”

Alex nodded, and Luis lowered his arm to let him pass. Alex walked into the room and shut the door behind him, locking Emma, Todd, and Alex in the room alone together.

It was the first time the three of them had been together since the day Gordon strolled into the Wyoming community and revealed exactly what Alex was doing, without the context of why. Emma still had on the same face Alex remembered. The lines of pain and anguish had yet to diminish.

“You’ve got some nerve coming back here,” Emma said, her voice shaking with anger.

Alex twisted his fingers together, peeling off the dried dirt and blood that was still caked on his skin. He hadn’t changed or showered since the battle, and he hadn’t looked at himself in a mirror in days, so he could only imagine what kind of shape he was in.

“What I did to your family isn’t forgivable. And that’s not why I came here,” Alex said.

“Then what are you doing here?” Emma asked, her tongue slashing each syllable like a knife into his flesh.

“I’m going to kill Gordon. I don’t care how long it takes me or what it costs me. He’s going to die. That’s my promise to you, which is the only form of recompense I can give.”

Alex turned to leave, and when he placed his hand on the door handle, Todd spoke. “The boy from your community. What was his name?”

Alex released his grip on the handle and turned around. “Meeko.”

“I’m not going to thank you for saving me,” Todd said, “but I will thank you for saving that boy’s life.”

With those words, Alex could feel himself losing what small resolve he had left. He could see his own reflection in Emma’s face as she too began to break down. Simple words, yet so impactful. Alex stemmed the tears before they could grow any further, and Emma walked toward Alex and grabbed him by the arms. Her face was a mixture of rage, sorrow, and fear.

“Finish it, Alex,” Emma said. “For good.”

“I will.”

***

The projection of the map across the wall in the briefing room had a red line that started in Topeka then headed north until it reached the Canadian border. Frizen pointed to the final destination, which was a small town off the Canadian West Coast called Victoria.

“This is where our intelligence believes Gordon will meet up with the Chinese,” Frizen said, clicking to another slide with Gordon’s face and his known accomplices. “Now, we know for a fact that Sydney Farnes is travelling with Gordon, along with Gordon’s right hand, Jake Mitchum. In addition to those traveling companions, Gordon also has a team of the best Class 3 sentries his organization had to offer. They are armed to the teeth, gentlemen, and they are trained to draw blood.”

Luis raised his hand. “Have we made any headway with Canadian assistance?”

“No. While the Canadian government has granted us permission to recon, they will not be allocating any resources. They believe this is an American problem and don’t want send any mixed signals to the Chinese.”

Alex could feel the dissent morph through the crowd as Frizen continued his presentation. It felt odd sitting in a war room with soldiers. When Alex was in high school, a recruiter for the Marines showed up and tried talking kids into joining after graduation. He remembered looking over the pamphlet when he got home. His father thought it’d be good for him, but his mother was against it. In the end, he decided not to join. He’d never wanted to put himself in a position where he’d have to kill someone. Now, that was all he wanted to do.

“Every single member of Gordon’s party needs to be brought in. We have no way of knowing if Gordon has duplicated the material to allow for it to make its way into the hands of the Chinese government, or worse,” Frizen said then clicked the projector, which slid back up into the ceiling.

The lights flickered back on, and Alex rubbed his eyes, trying to shake off the exhaustion that had plagued him for the past three years and seemed to have reached a crescendo over the past week. His whole body felt tired. His bones felt like they would snap in half, and his joints cracked and popped as he shifted in his seat. Just a little bit further.

“Gentlemen,” Frizen said, his voice a little louder than before to grab the attention of everyone in the room. “I don’t need to tell you how important this mission is. If the Chinese obtain Professor Penn’s soil data, they’ll use every bit of it to their advantage. We’re on our heels, boys. Everyone in the world can see it. Let’s make sure they don’t add to the growing pile of burden we have on our shoulders. Dismissed.”

The room erupted in activity as everyone started readying themselves for the mission. The weariness in Alex’s body disappeared with the influx of motion, and he found Admiral Frizen speaking with one of his men. “Admiral, I was hoping I could talk to you in private.”

“Of course,” Frizen said, leading Alex away from the rest of the group. “What can I help you with, Alex?”

“I appreciate you letting me be a part of this mission. I know I don’t have the same training as the other soldiers.”

“If it weren’t for you, Alex, I don’t think we would have gotten to Todd in time. I know Luis was grateful for your help.”

Alex reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded up piece of paper. “I was hoping you could deliver this to a friend of mine, if I don’t make it back.”

Alex knew the admiral had probably received hundreds of these requests from men in similar positions, bestowing the onus of the last request upon his shoulders. Frizen must have had good relationships with many men whom he would have agreed to the noble task of helping, but Alex wasn’t sure if he would be one of them.

“I don’t really have anyone else I could give it to,” Alex said.

The piece of paper had one name written on it. Meeko. Frizen took the paper from Alex’s hand and folded it gently into his pocket. “Hopefully I’ll just be able to return it to you when this is over.”

“Thank you, Admiral.”

“What you had to do,” Frizen said, stopping Alex from leaving, “wasn’t easy.”

“I try not to use it as an excuse.”

“Good men never do.”

Frizen left Alex, leaving him alone in the empty makeshift conference room, which had now gone quiet. Alex took a good look at the room around him, absorbing the solitude. Even though he was still in his home state of Kansas, he never felt farther away from home in his life.

Chapter 12

The marina in Victoria was modest. A few dozen fishing boats lined piers and docks that jutted from the side of the beach into the Pacific. The waves lapped lightly onto the side of the hulls, bumping the boats into the cushioned buoys on the pillars that kept the docks from sinking into the ocean below.

The moon was out, and the lack of unnatural light from the town inland allowed for the stars to shine bright in the dark, cloudless sky above. Gordon was nestled in the middle of his armed escort, with both Jake and Sydney on either side of him.

The wood panels creaked under the boots of the Class 3s, marching down the dock. Their uniforms and guns blended into the darkness around them as they cut through the night.

“It should be at the end of the dock,” Gordon said.

“I hope these chinks deliver, Gordy,” Kriken said. “Because if they leave us stranded here, you’re going to have a very big problem on your hands.”

Gordon could feel a chill crawl up his spine that he chose to blame on the cool night air. Sheng had told Gordon the boat would be marked with an orange light, glowing from the inside of the cabin. He kept his eyes peeled, searching left and right, trying to locate the boat that would grant them their freedom.

The boats grew larger the farther they walked out on the dock. Jake kept looking around nervously, his hand hovering just outside his jacket for his pistol.

“Will you calm down?” Gordon asked. “Christ. You’re making me nervous.”

“I don’t like this,” Jake said. “We’re too exposed. If we get ambushed here, the only way out is on one of these boats, and I don’t know how to swim.”

“Then don’t fall out.”

Finally, Gordon saw the distinct orange glow coming through the cracks of one of the doors of a cabin. “Wait. Here,” Gordon said, pointing to the ship’s deck.

Kriken and the rest of the Class 3s aimed their rifles at the boat and slowly boarded. The moment Gordon let his foot hit the side of the boat’s hull, a man dressed in a business suit stepped out of the cabin, and the orange light flicked off.

“Mr. Reath,” the man said. “My name is Lu Feng. I’ve been instructed to walk you through the negotiations of your deal with President Sheng.”

Lu was escorted by a few armed guards himself, all of which were wielding automatic weapons. Gordon motioned for the sentries to lower their weapons, which they did so slowly and reluctantly.

“I hope Sheng didn’t think he could change the terms of our agreement at the last second, because it seems to me that I brought more guns than you did,” Gordon said.

“I’m simply here to confirm a reasonable amount of your soil data to ensure that President Sheng isn’t wasting resources on something that doesn’t exist. Do you have the sample?” Lu asked.

Gordon nudged Sydney, who extended a small thumb drive. “There should be enough gene sequences on there for you to see that we’re not bluffing. We’ve discovered a way to enhance the soil to a level with triple to quadruple the soil’s natural properties,” Sydney said.

Lu inserted the drive into a laptop, and the entire boat was silent, rocking gently back and forth, as the data was analyzed. Despite the cool demeanor, Gordon was losing control of his internal functions as he had trouble trying to breathe. Lu removed the drive from the laptop and extended it back to Sydney. “Most impressive. As agreed we will receive the full data upon your arrival in Bejing.”

“So now what?” Gordon asked. “I hope we’re not swimming to China.”

“The boats will take us just north of the city, upon where we’ll make landfall on the peninsula. We have a jet waiting for you,” Lu said.

“Well, I hope it’s a bigass jet,” Kriken said.

“I was unaware you would have so many… associates joining you,” Lu replied.

The boat rocked as Kricken’s men grew uneasy, and he stepped forward between Gordon and Lu. “What the fuck is going on here, Gordy?”

“We’ll make sure there is room,” Gordon said, his mouth suddenly drying. He could see Jake reaching for his pistol. The sentries had a mix of guns pointed at Lu and his men, Gordon, Jake, and Sydney.

“These three boats are here for our disposal,” Lu said. “One of my men will be escorting you on each boat.”

***

The intelligence had paid off, and Alex, Luis, and the rest of the soldiers on the mission watched Gordon head out onto the dock, where they were joined by another smaller group of men on a boat. “That’s one of Sheng’s advisors,” Luis said.

They were positioned on a small hill that overlooked the marina. Every single soldier was dressed in camouflage and wetsuit gear. Alex could feel his muscles tighten at the sight of Gordon. “We need to get down there. They could take off any minute.”

“And go where? The only airstrip is inland,” Luis said.

“Let’s go ask.”

Alex, followed by Luis and the rest of the soldiers, maneuvered down the side of the hill until they crawled into the water and submerged themselves into the murky Pacific Ocean. Even with the wetsuit on, Alex could still feel the frigid waters freeze his extremities. He did his best to keep up with the Special Forces swimming past him, but the breaststroke wasn’t his strongest suit.

The dock where Gordon and the rest of his henchmen were located was two piers down. Alex pawed the hulls he passed, feeling the bumpy, grainy barnacles under his glove, and each time his ears broke the surface of the water he could hear the voices of Gordon and his men grow louder. With the thump of the boots on the deck overhead, Alex knew they had finally made it to Gordon’s dock.

“We’ll put ten men to a boat. Everyone load up!”

Luis and his team used hand signals to communicate, and on cue, they split into three separate groups, each to handle one of the boats. Luis gave Alex a rundown before the mission so he could have some understanding of how to communicate using the navy’s signals.

Alex stuck with Luis’s squad, and they made their way down to the third boat. In the darkness, and with the amount of people, it was hard to tell who was who in the shadowy figures above them.

Alex hung back, looking into the darkness to see if Gordon was on the boat they’d targeted, but the cold combined with the fact that he had to tread water made it difficult to see. Then, as Luis gave the signal to open fire, Alex saw the profile of Gordon’s face light up by the cabin light of the center boat.

Quick, percussive shots echoed across the water’s surface as the Class 3 sentries who were aboard the vessels collapsed. The coordinated strike killed over half the sentries before they even realized what was happening.

Both Gordon and Lu Feng’s men rushed to untie the rope tethering them to the dock as their fingers fumbled with the cleats, gunfire bursting all around them. A group of Luis’s men had already made their way onto the dock. The radio in Alex’s ear, combined with the gunfire both above and around him, put him in the middle of chaos.

Before the team commandeering the center boat could board, the engines roared to life, and the wake sent a mouthful of seawater and foam into Alex’s face. “That was Gordon’s boat!”

“You sure?” Luis asked.

“Yes!”

With the two other boats still scrambling to take off, Alex followed Luis up the side of the dock and onto the splintered wooden boards. Steam rose off his wetsuit from his body heat meeting the cool night air around him.

Alex’s wetsuit dripped onto the sentries’ bodies and blood that littered the dock and the two boats that were still tied to the dock. Luis cranked the boat’s engines to life, and his men untied the ropes from the cleats. Alex held onto the boat’s railings as they made their way out of the marina and into the bay.

Gordon’s boat was still visible in the distance. Alex gripped the boat’s railing as the bow bounced over the ocean waves, sending salty sprays into his face. The wind whipped viciously against his body, triggering involuntary spasms.

“Where is he going?” Alex asked, screaming over the whine of the boat’s engines.

“I don’t know. The only thing north of here is a nature preserve. Other than that, it’s nothing but ocean until you hit the southern Alaskan coastline,” Luis answered.

With both Gordon’s boat and their boat maxed in speed to the point of capsizing, neither party was gaining ground or losing it. The distance between both vessels remained equal until Gordon’s boat took a sharp turn into the coastline toward the nature preserve.

“There!” Alex said.

“I see him,” Luis answered.

The boat disappeared around the tip of an island, and by the time Luis and Alex made their way around the tip as well, Gordon’s boat was already pushed firmly up against the shoreline, with him and his men running into the woods.

“This is Commander Luis Claire requesting air support.” The radio crackled until the commanding voice on the other end broke through. “Negative, Commander. The Canadians have not authorized the use of any birds in the sky.”

“Shit,” Luis said.

Alex’s body leaned forward from the momentum of the boat as they made landfall. He jumped over the side, splashing back into the frigid water, and trudged up the shore until his feet were firmly planted in the sand below him.

The tree line was filled with lush vegetation, intermixed with bare trees affected by the winds bringing GMO-24 to the Canadian coasts. Still, even with the sparse patches of death, this was the first time Alex had seen anything resembling an actual forest in years. Memories of hunts from his youth flashed in his mind. Despite the cold gripping him, and the soggy suit he wore, this was the first time in a very long time where he felt like he was home.

“All right, boys,” Luis said. “Let’s go hunting.”

Alex lowered the pair of night vision goggles that he was allocated for the mission, and the forest morphed into a fluorescent green. In the distance, one hundred yards away, he could see the flicker of bushes and leaves. With no breeze in the area, the violent movement could only be from Gordon and the fleeing sentries.

“I have movement,” Alex radioed. “One hundred yards north. They’re moving fast.”

Alex double-timed it, weaving through the trees and bushes soundlessly, finally in his element. The NVDs allowed him an advantage he’d never had in his hunts before. Whenever he hunted at night, he relied mostly on his ears and his nose, but with the added sense of sight, his agility and precision doubled.

The rustle of leaves and branches grew wilder as Alex continued his pursuit, with Luis and his men flanking him on either side. Through the trees, Alex could see flashes of limbs. An arm there, a leg here, all sprinting toward whatever safety they thought they could find.

Alex scanned the trees in front of him, searching for Gordon, whom he knew was out there among them, when a bullet exploded a piece of tree bark in the trunk next to his head. Alex dropped to one knee and shifted his view left in the direction of the shot. The crosshairs of his scope nestled right over the left eye of the sentry who fired the shot, and with one quick squeeze of his trigger finger, the sentry fell backwards into a lifeless heap.

Alex pushed himself off the ground and continued his pursuit forward as gunfire erupted into the quiet night. The flashes from the tips of the rifles exploded in brilliant white lights through the lenses of the goggles. The radio grew loud with chatter, and Alex pulled the voices from his ear to focus on the hunt.

The brush and leaves around him scraped against his thighs as he pushed forward as he brought another sentry, who stuck his neck out a little too far from behind the tree, into his crosshairs and ended what fight he had left in him.

The farther Alex pushed, the denser the sentries, and the firing grew. But he could feel them on the run. He could sense the retreat.

A bullet smacked into Alex’s chest, slamming him backwards onto the ground, where his left elbow smacked into a rock with a resounding crack. The pain sent vibrations of tingles through the rest of his arm. When he tried to bend it, the pain only worsened. “Shit.” He picked up the rifle with his right arm and one-handed it as he forced himself forward. The bullet that connected with the Kevlar on his chest made it feel like the breastbone had cracked. He focused on his breathing, trying to keep it steady until the pain subsided.

The farther Alex’s pursuit led him, the thinner the trees and forest grew, until he saw exactly what the sentries and Gordon were running toward. There was a clearing in the woods where the lights of a jet blinked anxiously to take the convicts away from their persecutors.

The jet engines roared to life in preparation for takeoff, and Alex broke out into a sprint, each step forward sending a pain up the side of his left arm, radiating from his elbow. Luis’s men kept pace with him, together in their relentless pursuit. The steps of the plane lowered as Alex watched a few men climb inside. They were running out of time.

The sentries made a stand just outside the jet. The wall of bullets forced Alex and the rest of the soldiers to seek the cover of the trees just before the clearing where the jet stood waiting to take off.

Bits of wood and bark splintered from the tree trunk that protected Alex from the deadly fire. The moment he felt a lull in shots, he dashed to his left, dodging the concentrated fire from the sentries. The farther left he went, the scarcer the trees became, allowing the sentries to take their time as they waited for his perilous sprints.

The pain radiated from Alex’s arm and intensified the longer he continued his cat-and-mouse game until he finally made it parallel to the door of the jet, where there was only one sentry focusing his efforts on him. Once Alex took him out, he would have a clear shot straight into the cabin of the jet, whose engines were whining more furiously now.

With the Class 3’s aim moving dangerously close to Alex’s head, and the thin tree he managed to find cover behind slowly disappearing one bullet at a time, he had to make his move now. Just one shot. That was all he needed. Just one shot. 

Alex spun around from the protective barrier of the tree and jumped forward, where he landed on his stomach. Another blinding shot of pain pulsated from his elbow upon impact, but he clenched his jaw and brought the chest of the sentry between his crosshairs. He squeezed the trigger, sending the sentry onto his back. Alex jumped from his position, keeping his rifle aimed at the lifeless sentry on the ground. When he popped his head up, Alex sent one through his forehead then focused his attention on the ladder. Shadows from the inside hurried back and forth, and before any of them could close the door, Alex rushed up the steps.

The moment the front of his rifle entered the cabin, he felt it yank forward from a forceful grab and was met with a quick punch to the face. Disoriented, Alex managed to keep a good hold of the rifle as Jake reached for the pistol under his jacket while trying to subdue Alex.

Alex released his grip on the rifle and brought the full force of his body into Jake, which blocked him from removing the pistol and sent the two of them crashing to the ground. With his left elbow still in excruciating pain, Alex only had the use of his right arm to keep Jake’s pistol from aiming at his head. The two men exchanged blows, each slamming their elbows, knees, and feet into whatever piece of flesh they could find.

Jake’s finger slipped from the barrel onto the trigger, sending three rounds into the jet’s ceiling. Both men recoiled from the repetitive shots of thunder, which gave Alex just enough time to reach for the blade at his side and bring it to Jake’s neck. Jake froze, still with his hand on the gun. Alex kept a firm tension on Jake’s neck with the edge of the blade. “Drop the gun, and get up.”

Jake set the gun down, and Alex picked it up, removing the blade from Jake’s throat and replacing it with the tip of the barrel into Jake’s temple and stepped behind him, using Jake’s body as a shield. “Gordon!”

Alex looked over the rows of seats until three heads popped up, two of which were Asian, and the third was Sydney. Alex motioned for them to step into the aisle and keep their hands in the air, with which they complied. “It’s over, Gordon. Come out. Now!”

Finally, in the very back of the plane, Gordon revealed himself, flashing both palms in Alex’s direction to make sure Alex knew he was unarmed. The gunshots outside started to fade, becoming more sporadic.

“Out of the jet, now,” Alex said.

“And go where?” Gordon asked. “I don’t think you realize what we have here, Alex.”

Sydney was the first to come down the aisle. He picked up Alex’s rifle and pointed it at the two Asian men.

“It’s over, Gordon,” Alex said.

“You walked away from a golden opportunity once before, Alex. Don’t make the same mistake again. Think about it! We have the most valuable resource at our fingertips right now, and we have a buyer that’s willing to pay us whatever we want!”

Jake’s body tensed up as Alex kept the gun aimed at his head.

“Don’t be as stupid as you were three years ago, Alex,” Gordon said, his voice lowering to the tone of a threat. “It didn’t work out for you then, and it’s not going to work out for you now.”

“I think it will,” Alex said.

“Pity.”

Gordon pulled a pistol from his back and emptied the magazine into Jake’s chest and the backs of the two Asian men before Alex could even get off a shot. Sydney fired the AR-15 but didn’t hit anything other than a few seats before the recoil of the gun caused it to slip from his weak grip. 

Alex ducked behind the first row of seats on the jet as Sydney took one in the shoulder and dropped to the ground. Alex pushed Jake’s body off him as he heard the click of a firing pin, signaling that Gordon was empty. Before he could jump to take him out, a Class 3 made his way up the stairs, and Alex sent three rounds into his chest, which tumbled him backwards. Alex was to his knees when Gordon came flying over the top of the seats and crashed into him, knocking him back to the floor.

The two wrestled for the gun in Alex’s hand, as Alex struggled to overpower Gordon with only the use of his right arm. Alex brought his knee to Gordon’s side repeatedly, knocking the wind out of him. Gordon retaliated with a harsh right across Alex’s chin that ejected a combination of blood and saliva from his mouth.

“You know the first thing I’m going to do when I make it out of here?” Gordon asked, sweat dripping down his forehead as Alex’s fingers slowly started to lose their hold on the pistol. “I’m going to hire the best assassin money can buy to come and kill that fucking kid you’re so fond of. I’ll make sure he’s awake when it happens, and that you’re tied up and watching it unfold. You’ll see every piece of him torn apart, and just before you reach the moment where you can’t handle it anymore, he’ll put a bullet in your head. So that way the last thing you’ll ever see will be the boy’s mangled body, and the last thing you’ll hear will be his screams, haunting you in whatever hell of an afterlife you’ll have waiting for you.”

With every last ounce of will Alex had left, he lifted his left arm, and a massive crack sounded from his elbow as his fist connected with Gordon’s jaw, knocking him to the floor and releasing his hold on the pistol.

Alex got to his feet, still hunched over from the pain. Blood dripped from the corner of Gordon’s mouth as he stumbled around on all fours in the aisle between the seats. Gordon held up his hand, breathing heavily. “Okay. All right. Haha, you win.”

Alex placed his finger on the trigger and took a stumbling step forward. His left arm was completely numb and seemed frozen at his side, unmoving like a piece of concrete. “Do you even know what you did?” Alex’s voice escaped in breathless gasps. “There wasn’t a family in this country that wasn’t affected by how you ran things. The way you herded people like cattle and then slaughtered them like animals. No.” Alex shook his head. “No, I’m not taking you in.”

“Alex, listen, you don’t want to do this,” Gordon said.

“Yes. I do.”

Alex squeezed the trigger and dumped the rest of the bullets into Gordon, causing six red stains to shimmer on his chest and abdomen as he fell backwards onto the pile of bodies he’d killed himself.

Alex dropped the gun and collapsed to the ground. He rested his head on the seat behind him, and his eyes grew heavy. His left arm rested on the floor, and the oozing river of blood that had gathered slowly made its way over to him.

He watched it glide onto his hand and then onto his leg. He just sat there, letting the blood wash over him. He could feel the finality. The scales had been tipped back into balance, and the maniac who had disrupted the harmony of justice was dead.

Chapter 13

Video cameras, lights, sound equipment, reporters, and White House personnel had flooded the Oval Office in preparation for the president’s speech. Admiral Frizen stood in the corner, his uniform neatly pressed and cleaned, waiting for the proceedings to begin.

It’d been almost a month since the Soil Coalition’s collapse, and the country was still very much in a state of recovery, and the way the president handled tonight’s speech would determine whether the nation would continue toward healing or begin another civil war.

The attendees in the room rose as the president walked in and immediately sat behind the desk while he flipped through a few note cards in his hands. “How much longer until we’re live?” he asked.

“Sixty seconds, Mr. President.”

Frizen knew the risks the president was taking by giving this address, but he believed it was something the country truly needed. It was the act of lies and cover-ups that put them in this position in the first place. It was time for the truth to have its day.

The room went silent as the president set his notes aside and the director counted him down. The camera’s red light turned on, and the president began his address.

“Good evening, my fellow Americans. I come to speak to you this evening in the spirt of truth and forgiveness. Something that I, and many of my colleagues here in Washington, believe is needed in light of recent events. It is no secret that the crimes the Soil Coalition performed under the authority of Gordon Reath were despicable horrors, but many are unaware of how those atrocities came about. The Soil Coalition’s original purpose was to be a driving force in the search for a cure of the plague that GMO-24 set upon us, which ravaged our farmlands and prevented us from providing the food necessary to sustain our country and its people. I’m here to tell you that it was your government, under my order and direction, that allowed the atrocities of the Soil Coalition to go unchecked and unrestricted. However, I want to make it clear that at no time did I ever order for the torture or murder of any American enrolled in the Soil Coalition’s community program. But a lack of knowledge does not forgive me of the horrors committed by Gordon Reath and the men under his command.”

The president’s throat caught, and Frizen watched him grab a glass of water. Frizen knew that what the president was admitting was suicide. He would be tried for treason, crimes against humanity, and sentenced to life in prison, or worse. But despite the president’s negligence of the past events, he was glad to see that the commander in chief was finally leading by example. This would be an historic first that would hopefully purge the rest of the rats out of Washington.

“However, the greatest atrocities committed by this government happened long before the Soil Coalition was even thought into existence. When many of the countries around the world, including our own, had millions of men, women, and children going hungry, this administration took the first bold steps to end famine. The result of those efforts culminated in the creation of GMO-24. While we learned later that some of the test results were tampered with, and some even destroyed, this was the cause of the devastation that brought so much pain to our country and to many of our neighbors in Mexico and Canada. But as this evening’s announcement will no doubt trigger anger and frustration to the American people, let me also tell you that we have found a cure for the disease that plagued our nation. Right now, in the great state of Kansas, the first round of soil treatments is being administered to allow food to once again grow in our country. Every square acreage of land that was affected by GMO-24 will receive its vaccine to return the soil back to its fertile state.”

The president paused, and the teleprompter in front of him stalled, waiting for him to continue. He had reached the end of his speech, and the only words left were “God bless us, and God bless the United States of America.” But he knew it wasn’t enough. There was one final leap to take. “I failed you. Your government failed you. Now, as citizens of this great nation, it’s up to you to decide what happens to us. We have always been a great nation. And if you choose, we can be again. God bless us, and God bless the United States of America.”

***

Jared Farnes clicked off the television after the president’s first few words. He didn’t need to hear any more. Despite his perjury on the stand, he knew the American people were too weak to do anything but wail about how they were mistreated and betrayed. Once the stomachs of the nation were full again, this would be nothing more than a distant memory.

Plans and schematics lay across the desk in his study, and he returned his focus to what his mind was better than anyone else’s at: making weapons. The conflict with the Soil Coalition had given him so many questions to answer, and he’d spent the past month trying to find the solutions to them. He was so lost in thought that he didn’t notice his son was in the room until he tapped on his desk.

“Hello, father,” Sydney said.

Jared gave a curt nod then returned to his work. “I see you’re healing up nicely.”

Sydney rotated his shoulder and glanced over at the stitches still underneath. The air between them was filled with nothing but empty silence. The only reprieve from the lack of sound was the sporadic scribble of Jared’s pencil. Finally, once Jared realized Sydney wasn’t leaving, he set his pencil down and looked up at his son. “Well? What is it?”

“I’ll most likely be called as a witness once the president’s tried,” Sydney answered. “I may be asked questions about what I did for the Coalition. And what I did for you.”

Jared raised his eyebrow. His son’s tone had the heightened sense of a threat but with the shaking voice of a man who hoped he wouldn’t have to deliver it. “And what do you plan on telling them?”

“The truth.”

Jared gave a few short bursts that resembled a laugh but were closer to grunts as he leaned back in his chair, folding his hands on the back of his head. “The president giving you a spat of courage, boy? Well, you do what you have to do, but in the spirit of truth, know that I have no qualms about ordering a hit on any person in my organization who betrays me. Including you.”

“Goodbye, father.”

Sydney closed the door behind him, and Jared returned to his work, smiling at the sketches on his table. Odd structures and outlines of machines covered the papers, and at the top, scribbled in sloppy cursive, was “Genetic Defense.”

***

Todd looked up from the microscope and then rolled his chair over to his computer, where he struck the keys furiously, adding to the notes already in the system. “Where are we with the Wyoming deliveries?”

“They’re loaded up and ready to go, Professor.”

A small plaque rested outside the door to his lab that read Stanford Biochemistry. Most of the equipment was still being dusted off, but it only took Todd and a team of about thirty other scientists a few weeks to get it back up and running. The place was almost as good as new.

Todd leaned back in his chair, scratching his head, looking over the samples he had just packaged. Since he was put in charge of the mass production and distribution of the soil treatment, he wasn’t going to get anything wrong. The country’s recovery depended on it. “Hey, guys, we need to make sure we’re checking off the packages once they’re gone.”

“I’m sure everyone is double-checking everything,” Emma said, sneaking up behind him and wrapping her arms around his neck. He smiled, kissed her hand, then turned to hug her.

“I didn’t realize you were stopping by today.”

“We received a package,” Emma said, extending a brown box. Todd took it and flipped it over in his hands. The name on the return address said Alex Grives. “I thought you should be the one to open it.”

Todd peeled the paper slowly until the cover of the book Alex had shipped to him was exposed. He smiled. “Hemingway.” It was the same book Todd had gone to drop off the night Alex stole the soil data. He opened the cover, and inside on the first page was a handwritten note:

Todd and Emma,

              There are no words to express how much I am still indebted to you or how much the country is indebted to you, so I’ll simply say thank you. There is no equal to the pain I caused you or to the contributions you have given to the rest of us. You saved the country. If you ever find your way to Kansas, please, stop by. It would be an honor to see you again, and an even greater one to meet the newest addition to your family.

              With much respect,

                            Alex Grives

Emma placed both hands over her stomach, and Todd placed one of his over both of hers. She had a tear in her eye, and he wiped it away from her cheek before it rolled down her face.

“We get to start over,” Emma said.

“Yes,” Todd answered. “We all do.”

***

The first green tufts of corn sprouted up through the ground, and Alex dusted some of the rich, black earth off the tops as he squatted to examine his new crops. Meeko joined him and started poking the bits of green with his finger.

“When can we eat it?” Meeko asked.

“We still have some time to wait before that happens.”

“Well, good thing there’s food in the fridge, then.”

Alex sat there, examining the piece of land now teeming with life. Before the Soil Coalition, this was his parents’ farm. This was where he grew up, and it seemed like a good place for Meeko to grow up too. There was plenty of room to run and for a kid to be outside. But of everything Alex had loved about this place growing up, it now had the most important attribute he could think of. Unlike the gray, morbid Coalition communities, this place was surrounded by life. And that was something both Meeko and Alex needed to keep growing.

“Hey,” Alex said, looking down at Meeko, who was still prodding the green sprouts, “race you to the door?”

Meeko smiled and jumped to his feet. The two lined up, each poised to dash down their row of dirt toward the house. Alex smiled. “You ready?” Meeko nodded. “Go!”

The  first book in this series- GMO 24- Coalition- Can be downloaded for FREE Here-  http://amzn.to/1z7al1H

The second book- GMO 24- Infertile can be downloaded here: http://amzn.to/1JHWWAS