Max Ahlgren thought the nightmare he had endured in Alaska was over. He was wrong.
Consumed with finding the individuals responsible for the death of his family ten years earlier, Max is approached by Juno Rey, a seductive CIA agent who proposes a tantalizing offer—information on the killers in exchange for his help on a top-secret mission. The target: a covert biomedical research facility located deep in North Korea, where scientists are attempting to reverse engineer the alien life form discovered in Alaska.
An elite team of CIA operatives accompanies Max on the mission, but even their advanced weapons cannot ensure survival against the ruthless abominations created at the facility. As they fight to survive, Max must decide who he can trust as the devastating secret of their mission unravels. To unlock the secrets of his past, Max must again face his nightmares as he fights to save humanity from an unearthly terror.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
ISBN 978-1-54394-540-9 - Ebook
ISBN 978-1-54394-539-3 – Paperback
Cover Illustration Copyright © 2018 Ryan Aslesen
Cover layout by Deranged Doctor Design www.derangeddoctordesign.com
Book design and production by BookBaby
Editing by: Tyler Mathis
Leigh Hogan
© 2018 Ryan Aslesen. All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.
www.ryanaslesen.com
Contents
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
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25
About the Author
To my Mom. I hope you found the peace you wanted.
Acknowledgments
As the author, my name goes on the cover of this book and because of that I get the lion’s share of the credit if the book does well. However, a lot of other talented people worked tirelessly behind the scenes and helped make this book possible.
First, I would like to thank my developmental editor, Tyler Mathis, a fellow Marine and brother-in-arms, for helping me put this story together. Your creative talent and editorial skills have been instrumental in helping me weave my book ideas together into something coherent for the reader to enjoy. You have also given me invaluable advice and the confidence to push forward with my works.
I would also like to extend my appreciation to Leigh Hogan for all the time and energy put into copy editing my manuscript and helping make it the best it could be. You truly do work miracles at times. Your enthusiasm and sense of humor have made the dreaded editing process tolerable for me. Any mistakes or shortcomings that remain in this book are mine and mine alone.
A book isn’t complete without a cover and I want to thank Kim and Darja with Deranged Doctor Design for the final cover design and marketing materials. You guys have been awesome to work with and I appreciate your patience with me during the design and review process.
My heartfelt thanks also to my readers. I appreciate you purchasing my books, taking the time to experience my stories, and for your kind words of support. It has been an amazing journey and I truly hope you enjoy reading my books as much as I enjoy writing them. I’ll keep creating them as long as you keep buying them or pay me to stop.
Finally, I also wanted to thank my family for all your love and support. Your love is the high-octane fuel that drives my creative engine.
Beware the fury of a patient man.
— John Dryden
PROLOGUE
The girl lay in her hard, narrow bed and tried to shut out reality. Despite her best efforts to direct her thoughts elsewhere, she could hear her father’s voice growing louder through the thin walls of her room.
He ranted in the kitchen of their apartment: “Daily I slave to reform this world and free it from the yoke of capitalism, only to return home to this muck!” A plate struck the floor and shattered.
It is beginning. It began almost every night around dinnertime, when the snake bit her father. There would be no peace until he passed out in a bibulous stupor wherever he fell. The venom would leach out of him overnight, and the next morning he would awaken sober and smiling as if nothing untoward had occurred the previous evening.
In his mind, perhaps nothing had.
Often she wished that one of the vipers pickled in the bottles of bem ju, her father’s drink of choice, would come back to life and sink its fangs into his hand when he opened the bottle. She scolded herself for such thoughts as her father’s booming voice reverberated from every wall in the apartment. But it would be merciful. A quick death instead of a lingering one. And we would be spared.
But pickled serpents would never be her deliverance. The snakes in the bem ju bottles were undeniably dead when added to the liquor.
“What have I done?” her mother asked, sobbing. “I don’t understand.”
A fist crashed down on the kitchen table. The impact shook the apartment, perhaps the entire building. “Don’t try to trick me, woman!” The girl flinched at the sound when her father slapped her mother. “You’ve put horns on me, made me a laughingstock!”
“No, those are vile rumors,” her mother whimpered through a sob. “I would never—”
“Liar!” Objects crashed and broke, and she knew her father had upended the kitchen table. “Everyone knows. I see it written on all their faces! My only question is who?” He slurped more bem ju from his glass while his wife sobbed pathetic and pointless denials. The neck of the bottle clinked against her father’s glass as he poured another drink.
“It’s the soldier, isn’t it?” her father asked in a calmer voice. Had he not slurred his words, he would have sounded like the civilized scientist he allegedly was. “On the third floor? I hear you walked home from the commissary with him yesterday.”
“Yes,” her mother said. “He is crippled. I was merely assisting him.”
Her father paced the kitchen, his footsteps heavy and irregular. After a few moments of silence, his acerbic laugh cut a caustic swath through the dead air in the tiny apartment. “Ah, such a good Samaritan I have for a wife. And what did you do in his apartment after you carried his provisions up the stairs? Bathe him? Shave him? Fuck him? Maybe just suck his cock!”
“I would never—”
The air went out of her mother before she could finish, driven from her lungs by a fist to the gut. Unlike the resounding slaps of before, the blows from her father’s pummeling fists were barely audible over her mother’s grunts and cries of agony.
The girl could listen to no more. She wrapped her thin pillow around her head and pressed it firmly over her ears to drown out the savagery in the kitchen.
According to the state, theirs was an ideal family. She could only wonder why her father drank t
o such excess. All men and women toiled for the common welfare of the state, but only a privileged few had the honor of directly serving the Great Leader in his battle for world revolution. Though she knew her father was a brilliant scientist, she had no idea what sorts of projects he worked on in his laboratory, six days a week. “Important research that will hasten the demise of capitalism and unite our country once again,” was his cryptic answer whenever anyone asked.
He worked under tremendous pressure from the very highest levels—the Great Leader demanded progress and settled for nothing less than excellence. Unlike so many of his colleagues, who had failed and then disappeared, her father thrived under the stress. The Great Leader valued his work and had even bestowed upon him a plaque lauding his efforts in scientific advancement. This piece of polished wood with its gilded inscription, which featured a hammer crossed with the key of knowledge, hung proudly over her father’s favorite armchair. While every other object in the apartment had been damaged to some degree during her father’s drunken rages, the plaque remained pristine. If it hung askew after his bender, he would right it first thing in the morning, before he did anything else. He harbored a fierce loyalty to the state, and the Great Leader, and took immense pride in his mysterious work.
We should be happy. Why then is he like this? She couldn’t fathom his reasons, and the mystery hurt. Deep beneath her hatred for him was a desire to help that he had yet to beat out of her.
No one ever batted an eye over her bruises. When she went to school battered, her teachers pretended not to notice. Had she been the daughter of a common laborer, they might have informed the authorities. A man was expected to rule his home with unquestionable authority, but the Great Leader frowned upon habitual abuse of children, every one of which needed to grow up strong and healthy to fight the menace from the West.
But no one was going to report a man of her father’s prestige.
The girl could taste the woe pervading the stuffy air within her cramped, windowless bedroom. She debated removing the pillow from around her head, decided to keep it there a bit longer, but then changed her mind just as quickly upon hearing another loud crash. Her father’s wrath was especially fearsome tonight; he would soon finish with his wife. She didn’t want to know if he had her mother sufficiently impressed with his prowess, and yet she had to find out, for she knew what came next. Her father was a creature of routine.
And judging from the pitiful mewling coming from the kitchen, the creature had just about finished beating his wife. Drunk or sober, he strove for precision and order like any other scientist. Concrete beginnings demanded definitive endings.
“Trollop! Filthy sow!” She knew well the dull thump that followed—her mother being kicked as she lay helpless on the floor. Then her father spat on her. “You disgust me!”
And just as her mother lay supine and helpless, so did she. To fight his fury would be pointless, as she well knew.
She felt and heard his clomping, staggering footsteps as he strode to her bedroom door and flung it open. From within her dark room she saw only his silhouette in the doorway: a lithe man of thirty-five, hair tousled from his brutal exertions. He raised a piece of fine glassware to his lips and drank, downing the dregs of the bem ju. Properly sated, he flung the glass—part of a set that would have cost a common worker two weeks’ wages—back into the kitchen in the general direction of his wife, where it shattered on the floor.
He tottered, righted himself against the doorjamb, and took a step into her room. “You,” he softly hissed, pointing a finger. “You knew.”
She didn’t respond. Silence or denial would be met with the same force.
“So, you would prefer a crippled soldier for a father, you little bitch?” He took another step and another, each footfall coming faster as he stalked to her bed. Her shoulder erupted in pain when he seized her by the right wrist and yanked her from under the covers to flop on the floor.
As she looked up and saw him poised to pummel her, she knew the adults were all wrong: monsters were very real.
One day I’ll have the strength to fight them!
But for now, she could only endure the pain.
1
Thor Jurgensen watched the prominent mountain peak grow larger through the pilot’s windshield. He was close now. In and out. Get caught and you’ll rot in a cell. That couldn’t happen; he’d risked too much, and it was time to cash out.
“ETA?” he asked the pilot through the headset. They were the chopper’s lone occupants.
“About ten minutes, sir,”
“Take us lower, just above the treetops.”
After a moment’s hesitation, the pilot acknowledged and took the bird down to about three hundred feet.
“Lower,” Thor said. “Just above the trees.”
This time the pilot did not verbally acknowledge; nevertheless, he dropped lower—what most pilots would consider dangerously low—until the chopper’s skids nearly grazed the treetops. Thor saw, with great clarity, a small bird’s nest near the top of a fir and was satisfied with their altitude.
The government still monitored this area, but to Thor’s knowledge they were none too assiduous in their duties. In the wake of the explosion some ten months before, CIA and FBI personnel had swarmed the area around ground zero and the former Greytech Base Camp, searching for anything that might advance their own nefarious objectives. Finding little of interest left intact, they pulled out within a couple of months. Still, Thor had to be wary of radar monitoring. The area and the airspace above it were off limits, still considered a crime scene by the FBI, violators to be prosecuted. Thor chuckled. That’s the best you can hope for if you’re caught. Out here, deep in the Alaskan wilderness, the government’s agents were likely authorized to kill on sight, especially in light of what had occurred there some six months ago.
In, out, gone. He liked the gone part best. He would be in Norway by the time anyone figured out what he’d done.
The snow-capped mountain, known as Boundary Peak 171, loomed huge through the windshield. The US-Canada border split the peak down the middle. The firs below no longer stood tall—they had been knocked over and scorched limbless by the force of the blast. Thor had never visited Base Camp when it was operational—he’d known nothing of the operation other than its existence—but he was obviously close. Ahead, he caught his first glimpse of the blackened remains of Base Camp, situated in a narrow valley beside a stream that ran down from a glacier on the mountain.
“Give me a good view of the camp from the side window,” Thor said.
Base Camp had been an orderly operation—the late Elizabeth Grey would have tolerated nothing less—but now it lay in post-apocalyptic ruin. Scorched metal hulks, that had once been vehicles and heavy equipment, lay scattered amongst the wreckage of the metal prefab buildings that had housed the camp’s various activities. Months ago, the government had airlifted out the few intact items of interest; after that, Greytech salvaged the remainder of the serviceable equipment. The jagged holes ripped in the sides of the buildings attested to the power of the creatures the company had unleashed upon the world for a few days.
And you would unleash them again...
The thought posed a moral dilemma, for despite spending the past four years on Greytech’s Board of Directors, Thor still possessed a few ethical scraps. But he’d already decided the matter before boarding the Greytech executive helicopter to visit the site and claim his prize.
He thought of the ongoing war of words between the United States and North Korea. They’ll destroy the world no matter what, so what does it matter? Though a dual citizen of the US and Norway, Thor harbored no allegiance to America. He’d only become a US citizen so he could work in Seattle without a visa. The world would inevitably go to war one final time, and Thor figured he might as well enjoy the last few years before society collapsed into a chaotic apocalypse. He was prepared to discover jus
t how fun fatalism could be.
The blast crater, centered a mile up the valley from Base Camp, shattered his expectations. Though an engineer by trade, Thor was a man of broad interests. He’d read about the blast craters at the Nevada Test Site. Until the early nineties, the US government had detonated dozens of nuclear weapons in underground tests there. All of these bombs formed blast craters, some so large that Apollo astronauts had trained inside them before missions to the moon. Yet compared to the crater below, almost a mile wide and several hundred feet deep, the ones in Nevada might have been made by firecrackers. Nothing existed in the crater’s immediate vicinity—all the trees had burned to fine ash in an instant, and the glacier that once concealed the greatest marvel ever discovered had vaporized. Of the marvel itself, nothing remained. Whatever pieces of it the government located had been shipped off to top-secret locations for research.
A pity things didn’t turn out better. Only in the aftermath had Thor learned what Elizabeth Gray had unearthed beneath the glacier. To what lengths would I have gone, to tour an actual alien spacecraft?
According to rumor, the craft had been immense, at least double the size of the largest aircraft carrier. How long it had been buried was anyone’s guess, but glaciers did not form overnight. It might have crashed thousands of years ago, before the last ice age.
Rights to the advanced technology aboard such a vessel would have been worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But the late Elizabeth Grey, founder and former CEO of Greytech Industries, had been more concerned with the alien life form discovered onboard, a viscous fluid known only as “the substance,” which was crudely intelligent on the cellular level and possessed astounding regenerative qualities. According to Ms. Grey’s former executive assistant, Grey had hoped the substance might cure her son’s terminal cancer; thus she put technological discoveries aside to concentrate research on the “substance”.
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