Masks of Ash

by Adrian J. Smith

  Ryan headed for the car yard, not waiting to see if Zanzi and the others followed him. As the four of them entered, the gunmen unleashed full magazines into the cars above them. Round after round tore through the metal, filling it with more holes than a block of Swiss cheese. Ryan frowned. The commandos made no attempt to adjust their aim. Ryan was wondering why when the helicopters flew closer, the whump whump whump of their rotors louder than the roaring guns. Now he understood; they were being pinned down.

  “Humvees are moving,” Booth shouted.

  “Get back to the safe house. We can’t go anywhere.”

  “As if,” Cal said. Before she clicked off her radio, Ryan heard her MP5 popping, its suppressor making the bullets sound like the fizz when you open a can of soda.

  Ryan spotted Zanzi crawling underneath a row of cars with the doctor, guiding them deeper into the yard. The gunmen only paused to reload. They were unleashing hell. Glass, plastic, and metal rained down, and constant noise filled the air. Desperate, Ryan searched for a target. A hand, a leg, anything. He sent a few rounds into one SUV, but he had no chance of hitting anyone through the open windows from his angle. He just wanted to keep them guessing while Zanzi got the two civilians away.

  One of the Humvees screeched to a stop. The sound that came next chilled Ryan to his core. A high-caliber machine gun. That sound was ingrained in his psyche, just as it was for any soldier. Rounds chugged out, smashing can-sized holes into the already heavily damaged Toyotas. There was a whistle and a thunk, then a loud explosion, so loud it rattled his teeth.

  Ryan rolled under another car and sought Zanzi. She was nearly at the dealership’s office building, running hard.

  “Cal, Booth, Reid. SITREP.”

  Reid’s voice crackled in his ear first. “All clear.”

  “On our way, hold tight,” Cal said.

  “Reid. Watch our six,” Ryan said.

  He rolled under yet another car just as the M240 stopped firing. For a fraction of a second, Ryan thought he was going to hear someone shouting, but silence fell. The drizzling rain had finally stopped, and steam rose from the obliterated vehicles. He risked a quick peek in the direction of the choppers. Their whumps were getting closer but he couldn’t spot them.

  As quickly as it had stopped, the firing began again, both the .50 cal. and the rifle fire rattling back to life. Someone began lobbing grenades deeper into the dealership, and soon cars were exploding and lifting into the air. Their assailants made no attempt to hit Ryan, Zanzi or Lahm. To him, their intentions were clear: keep them pinned down. But if the Black Skulls wanted Doctor Lahm so bad, why risk killing her at all? Or was that the point? They weren’t trying to kill them; they were just keeping The Nameless occupied.

  Another M240 roared to life. This machine gun sounded further away, and the rounds didn’t land in the yard. Ryan checked the road to confirm his suspicions. Somehow, Cal and Booth had stolen the other Humvee and were using it to take out the Black Skulls. So focused were they on destroying every car in the dealership, they’d had no one guarding their rear. And if they had, they probably thought the Humvee had finally decided to show up and join in on the fun.

  Cal and Booth sprayed .50 caliber rounds into the three SUVs and Humvee. They exploded in shards of glass, metal and rubber. Ryan gawked at the sight of the Black Skull gunner disintegrating into a mist of flesh and tissue. One second his head was there, the next, it wasn’t. His body, left behind, tumbled over and dropped out of sight.

  Some of the Black Skulls tried to react, but it was too little too late. Booth fired the M240 with precision. In three minutes, it was all over. Threat neutralized.

  Ryan jumped up and waved them over. Together they drove into the Toyota yard.

  “Zanzi, what’s your location?”

  “Around the back of the building inside the mechanics pit.”

  “Copy that. We stole a Humvee. On our way.”

  Five minutes later, they had picked up Reid. The helicopters were still a few blocks over. Ryan ignored them and reloaded. One problem had been dealt with. Now for number two of a thousand.

  Twenty-Three

  Lisa Omstead finally spoke. “Offenheim?” she said through clenched teeth.

  “Yes, Offenheim ordered me to eliminate you,” Milo said, “but I refuse to. Instead, I have information. Critical information that can help you beat him. I only ask that we work together.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  Milo was still on his knees. He scuffed them on the old concrete floor. He was uncertain how to explain why he wasn’t a believer anymore. That he had lost faith.

  When he’d been a Stasi operative, it had been to give his sister a better life. But his actions had ended up killing her. Then Offenheim had offered him a fresh start, a way to make a better world, free of evil. When Milo had cradled Amelia in his arms as she turned to ash, the realization had hit him: OPIS had become the very thing they had wanted to eliminate.

  “They killed my wife. Like she was vermin. Seeing it opened my eyes about OPIS. When I saw the way LK3 fought, for the first time I believed that I too could change. I’m only asking for a chance.”

  “You did help us escape, and you did save Reid’s life.” She sighed. “I want to know everything about Offenheim.”

  Milo smiled. He would be happy to divulge his knowledge. Going after Offenheim would more than likely result in his own death, but he had no fear of dying. He should have died years ago. But he had been allowed to live. Doing this, linking with LK3, felt right. “In ten days, a reset of wave two will strike North and South America. A week after that, Offenheim plans to bomb the major West Coast cities.”

  “The exodus,” Lisa said. “That confirms what we already suspected, and it explains the troop movements.”

  “Yes. They’ve been ordered to slowly fall back east of the Rockies.”

  Lisa looked him over and spoke into her radio. “Sofia. What’s the status on The Nameless?”

  “Black Skulls set a trap, but they wiggled out of it. We’ve definitely been compromised. Traffic cams have been tampered with too,” Sofia said.

  Lisa uttered a curse. “Get ready to leave at the…”

  A shout interrupted Lisa as a flash of red flew past. Milo’s eyes widened, but his reactions were exceptional. It took Lisa several seconds before she comprehended what was happening. A blur that could only be Ebony spun and twirled, letting loose with roundhouse kicks and right-hand jabs. Milo blocked several of the blows and landed a few of his own, but Ebony’s speed and skill appeared too much for him.

  Lisa caught a flash of silver as Milo stabbed a small knife into Ebony’s wrist and another into her thigh. Her resulting scream was one of frustration, not pain. The fight spun away. Thuds from the blows echoed between the machines. Brutal blows that would knock anyone else unconscious. The two fighters shrugged them off as though they came from a toddler.

  “Wait, Ebony!” Lisa shouted, but the brutal fight continued.

  Milo scored a solid kick to Ebony’s chest and she tumbled away. Instead of benefiting from her fall, he jumped onto one of the machines and took off at a sprint, leaping from machine to machine as if they were stepping-stones in a quiet pond. It was like watching a parkour expert run through a city. Milo shimmied up the raised office block, across a beam, out a window, and disappeared into the night.

  Ebony returned from her chase, cursing. “Who was that?”

  “Milo. Once of OPIS. He was offering to help us.”

  “Should I go after him?”

  “No, leave it. I have a feeling he’ll be back.”

  Lisa banged on the door with the flaky green paint and spoke into her radio. “It’s me. It’s safe.”

  There was a loud scrape from the other side, and Jacqui poked her head out. “What was that all about?”

  “OPIS sent an assassin to eliminate us. We need to move to another location. Get everyone ready.”

  Lisa looked at the two male teachers they had rescued
from the school. They were sitting up now, at least. Their faces, covered in bruises, were healing slowly – too slowly for nanites to be present. Perhaps they had none. She recalled Jolene saying they were both vegan. Maybe that was why.

  The kids, fed and cleaned up, looked considerably better. Some were drawing in coloring books while others were reading. One or two played with a bucket of Lego that Reid had sourced on one of his scouting missions. Tilly and Keiko played cards with some older children. Sam happily napped at their feet. Every now and then, his tail would wag and scatter the cards. Lisa could be forgiven for thinking she was in a daycare center, watching the daughter she never had. She pushed the thought away. Her career had come first.

  Lisa hadn’t had time yet to think about what to do with the children long term. How to reunite them with family members. Their mission to get Doctor Josie Lahm had taken precedence. Munroe was the logical choice to help reunite the children with their families. They needed somewhere to hide out until they had secured their safety.

  She turned back to Jacqui. “We can’t take the children with us, and they can’t stay in the city. It’s not safe. I’ll see if Sofia can find somewhere. A summer camp or something.”

  “We used to go up to Timothy Lake every summer,” Jacqui said.

  “Does it have everything you’d need? I’m not sure how long it’ll be before we can even start to attempt finding their families.”

  “Camp Clarke had it all. If I were a betting girl, I would say it was getting ready for the summer and would be well stocked.”

  Lisa nodded. “Good. Take all the food from here, and whatever else you need. See if Jolene and the other teachers will go with you.”

  Tilly bounced over from playing cards. “Is Zanzi back yet?”

  “She’s on her way. Can you help Jacqui get the kids ready? We have to leave.”

  “Oh okay. Where are we going?”

  Lisa smiled. Tilly would make the perfect camp counselor. She was bubbly and filled with energy. The kids responded well to her. “Jacqui’s taking them to Camp Clarke. You know, she could use all the help she could get. Do you want to go too?”

  Tilly shook her head. “No thanks. I promised Zanzi that I’d help her.” Gone was the chirpy young woman. In her place stood a serious, determined one. “I have to go back. What they did to me in that place…what I witnessed. For years I shut it away and pretended none of it happened. Meeting Zanzi and all of you showed me that there are people willing to stand up. I can’t hide away at summer camp and pretend it didn’t happen. Zanzi showed me how to fight, so I’m going back with her to end it.”

  As Lisa listened to Tilly, she began to see what Zanzi saw in her. Tilly was no ditzy airhead. She was kind, intelligent, beautiful, and wanted to fight. Fight to right the wrongs and stop OPIS committing any more vile acts. LK3 were going to need all the soldiers and fighters they could muster. Who was she to stop Tilly?

  “We’ll be glad to have you,” Lisa said. “Get the kids ready. The sooner we leave this safe house, the better.”

  Lisa’s radio squawked. “Extraction team incoming,” Sofia said.

  “Copy that.” Lisa turned and hurried toward the raised office block.

  Twenty-Four

  The Nameless, along with Reid, Zanzi, Allie and Josie Lahm, met Sofia, Avondale, Jolene and Lisa in the briefing room. They exchanged small talk, along with handshakes and hugs. Lisa showed Ryan the footage of Milo and Ebony’s fight.

  “Sorry about that,” Ebony said. “Yamada trained me to attack men like Milo. I didn’t know you were cutting a deal.”

  “Forget it. He’ll be back.”

  Avondale coughed and typed away on a keyboard, muttering to himself about the camera feeds. An eerie atmosphere descended over the group as they took their seats.

  Ryan sat down at the table and looked over everyone. They were a rag-tag bunch, but all of them survivors. They fought for every centimeter, fought over every obstacle put in their way. Two weeks had now passed since that fateful Wednesday. Since then, they had grasped at shadows, at wisps of smoke, for information, gathering snippets as they fought to get home. They had fought Siphons, mutated hounds and rats. Fought Black Skulls determined to protect OPIS and its plans.

  Footsteps pounded up the stairs and Tilly burst into the room. She and Zanzi embraced and they whispered between themselves, heads bowed. Keiko and Ebony plonked down next to Tilly, while Sam wandered around, licking everyone’s hand.

  Lisa cleared her throat and motioned for everyone’s attention.

  “As most of you know, or can assume, we’ve been compromised. Obviously, we must move so we can plan out our mission to The Eyrie. We have ten days before the reset of wave two, and the week after, OPIS plans to bomb the major West Coast cities. But if they know where we are, they must be tracking us somehow. So does anyone have any ideas?”

  “It has to be the nanites,” Sofia said.

  Ryan and Cal nodded in agreement.

  “That makes sense. We found some subdermal chips on Zanzi and Tilly and removed them, yet they still found us. Avondale, what do you think?”

  “It’s possible. As each alpha nanite has a unique IP address, all OPIS would need is a way of tracking that.”

  “So how do we switch them off?”

  “I don’t know, but we could block the signal. If we can go somewhere with a Faraday cage, that would stop it. But getting to one is another matter.”

  It was as Lisa feared. Again, they had little information. But now they had one of the scientists responsible for the development of the nanites. That was why they had risked so much to extract her.

  “You’re Josie Lahm, right?” Lisa said, looking at the doctor. She had brown eyes, and the same high cheek bones and full lips as her daughter, Harriet, the girl who had started the chain of events leading up to this point. Zanzi finding the nanites in her blood. Kohli destroying the lab. Black Skulls attacking HQ. Harriet had been the catalyst.

  “Yes,” Josie said. “Most people call me Lahm.”

  “We have a lot to talk about, but first I need your thoughts on how these nanites operate. Can we block the tracking signal?”

  Lahm bit her lower lip. “I watched this TV show once, something sci-fi, where the mother loved her daughter so much. One day some pedo tried to kidnap her. After that, the mother installed some chip into her eyes so she could always track her daughter. Things went bad after that. Anyway, the moral of the story was, don’t mess with technology.” Lahm took a drink of her water. “And that’s all we were doing at OPIS, messing with technology. Offenheim was like a kid in a candy store. Once we had the basic features of the nanites functioning, he asked for more and more features. One was tracking individuals. It proved problematic, and I thought the project had been scrapped.”

  “So it’s possible,” Avondale said. He spun his gaming chair around and leaned forward. “They work like a cell phone, don’t they?”

  “Yes, the alpha nanites do. If Offenheim knows your IP address, then it’s plausible he could be tracking you.”

  Lisa slammed her palms onto the table. “Dammit. Can we switch it off?”

  “Maybe. Given enough time, I could figure it out. Not my field, but I could point you in the right direction.”

  Ryan took it all in, a plan forming as he ran through different scenarios. Since Lahm’s successful extraction, his mind had immediately turned to their goal of infiltrating the satellite installation known as The Eyrie and destroying it.

  “If these alphas…” Ryan tapped the back of his skull with his finger. “If these nanites operate similar to cell phones, we could use aluminum foil to at least muffle their signal?”

  “That could work,” Sofia said.

  “But we don’t know who’s being tracked,” Lisa said.

  “Then we make everyone a foil hat,” Avondale said.

  Laughter erupted from Booth, Allie and Keiko. Ebony’s grin widened. “Look at us, a bunch of conspiracy-theory nutjobs.”

&nbs
p; Lisa waited for the giggles to die down. “Do it. I hope it works. Everyone, grab your stuff. We move out in thirty minutes. Get the children loaded and work out who’s going to escort them to Mount Hood Forest Park. Nameless, stay with me. Dismissed.”

  The Nameless stayed where they were while everyone else filed out.

  Lisa brushed her hand through her long mane of graying hair and retied it into a ponytail. “What I’m about to say next goes no further than this room. It’s vital. Am I understood?”

  She was answered by a round of nods. “Good. When our headquarters were built, the location was chosen partly because it was an old missile silo, built back in the eighties during the height of the Cold War. The parking garage is, or was, on top of it. I insisted on leaving access to it just in case.”

  Ryan chortled. “That’s some foresight, Director.”

  “Maybe. I only wish I’d had an escape tunnel built that led to it. Zanzi and I could’ve used it.”

  “Then OPIS would know. Fate plays its hand, giving us what we need,” Booth said.

  Ryan had to hand it to Lisa. She had known the parking garage might come in handy one day. Professionals in their line of work had to be prepared. None of them could have imagined this scenario, but she had kept the ace up her sleeve nonetheless. It was the perfect location for their Forward Operating Base. It would have communications links and be protected from electronic interference.

  “Booth, I need you and Reid to escort the children to Lake Timothy. Make sure the camp is set up and that they have enough of everything before you head back to us,” Lisa said. She glanced up at the high windows. Dawn was breaking over Portland.

  Ryan followed her gaze and contemplated what the new day would bring. He was beyond exhausted, functioning on what little reserves he had left.

  “Move it, people. Avondale, scrub those computers. Leave no trace.”

  As Ryan left the room, he smiled at the director. He had known her for most of his adult life, and for the first time ever, he saw an uncertainty in her eyes.