For the Exalls to complete a clean gutting of the entire Pentagon, they would have needed hundreds—if not thousands—of infected gray people to infest the building, killing everyone in sight without a discussion. They had yet to see any bullet holes or wounds aside from Colonel Griffins. Surely a handful of Exalls with their fists wouldn’t have been able to pull off what they did without someone fighting back. It was a well-planned sneak attack.
The attacks happened in the blink of an eye. There were at least 12,000 people working in the Pentagon at any given moment, yet miraculously not a single person had a moment’s notice to realize they were under attack and call the police, another department, or even their own family. 12,000 people was a low estimate—there were probably closer to 16,000 at the time of the attacks.
The group of Crew soldiers only swept main offices, forgoing the checking of every individual conference room and closet door. There could be survivors somewhere in the building, but it seemed more like a poisonous smoke bomb had gone off, suffocating every person no matter where they were.
Even a group of, say, 1,000 Exalls couldn’t massacre 16,000 people on their own. Something was not adding up, and they all knew it, a sense of doom settling over them like a dark cloud. If 16,000 people didn’t stand a chance, why would their little squad of twelve think they were anything special?
“How did this happen?” one of the soldiers asked.
“I have no idea,” Ortiz snapped.
“How is there not one person alive? Impossible.”
The fear grew palpable in their voices, yet Kyle felt an odd calm. If the Exalls were going to attack them, what were they waiting for? They had just spent two hours walking through the entire building, floor after floor of dead bodies.
“We missed them,” Kyle said. “They killed everyone and left. There’s no one waiting for us—they’re gone.”
The soldiers lowered their weapons as if Kyle’s words were a trusted prophecy. If the wonderkid said they were gone, then they were gone, no reason to doubt it.
“We need to get word to the White House,” Ortiz said. “I don’t know what else we can do.”
“Has no one in D.C. tried contacting the Pentagon?” another asked. “How can they have gone two hours without knowing what happened here?”
After a pause the answer was obvious, but no one said it aloud.
“I think we need to get back to The Crew offices,” Ortiz said with a new urgency. “We don’t have much time.”
On cue, a rumbling like thunder vibrated in the clear blue sky, the ground trembling beneath their feet.
“Run!” Ortiz screamed, pivoting and bolting toward the Pentagon’s entrance.
Everyone followed suit, Kyle trailing behind and looking up to the deafening, thunderous noise of Air Force jets zooming above. Ten of them flew by in a V-formation, rumbling the world below.
“Get the fuck inside!” the last soldier cried out.
Kyle dashed and lunged through the door, following the trail of soldiers sprinting through the halls toward the elevator.
“Hurry! Hurry!”
The ground vibrated, and Kyle’s first thought was that an earthquake was beginning. So why on Earth would they want to go further down into the ground?
* * *
They jammed into the elevator, the door closing with a banal chime before it started its descent to the second underground level where they’d have to scurry across the parking lot to catch the other elevator to return to their secret office.
“What’s going on?” Kyle asked as they all panted like thirsty dogs.
“No time to explain. We need to keep moving.”
The elevator doors parted and they immediately ran, the ground no longer vibrating. Their boots sounded like a stampede of wild stallions galloping through the dim garage as they reached the other elevators. Ortiz stood with his arms over his head as he caught his breath waiting for the elevator to arrive. He laughed nervously when it opened and took relaxed steps inside.
“We made it,” he said as they started their descent. “Holy shit, we made it.”
They were now gasping for air, having just gone from the Pentagon’s back door to their underground lair within two minutes, surely a record time.
“Tell me what’s going on,” Kyle demanded. It was clear that everyone was in on the secret besides him.
Anderson held up a finger as his lungs still begged for fresh oxygen. A few seconds passed and he said, “Plan D. . . Doomsday.”
Kyle fuzzily recalled learning about Plan D during his training. It was briefly discussed and dismissed as a last resort, essentially only to be used if it was deemed the country was already doomed by an alien invasion so massive that The Crew couldn’t contain it.
“What does it mean?” Kyle asked, knowing, but needing to hear it spoken aloud by someone else.
“Over the next twenty-four hours, our country will be wiped out until it’s a pile of rubble. The only people who have a chance at living through this are any Crew members able to get underground, and the president and his family.”
“I don’t get why we can’t just kill the Exalls.”
“Because they’ve already won,” the leading soldier said calmly. “We either wipe out ourselves or they’ll do it for us. If we do nothing, they will burn this country to the ground, and then the rest of the world. We can either eliminate our entire population, or sit by and watch as the entire world becomes infected with Exall blood. It’s a sick decision that can only be made by the president. If he feels our only hope for saving the human race is to start over with a handful of people, then he has no choice.”
The soldiers sat in silence, nodding to themselves as they processed this reality. Kyle thought he felt the ground shake, but chalked it up to his imagination. They were too far below ground to feel anything. Please let Mom and Dad be hiding in the bunker. They might just make it out alive.
“So what happens next?” Kyle asked. All he wanted to do was call his parents and tell them he loved them. To find shelter. Hide in the panic room. But his cell phone was still on the colonel’s desk.
“Today we just need to try and relax, whatever that means to each and every one of you. Natural sleep will be impossible, so maybe head to the First Aid office and grab some sleeping pills. Trust that you are safe down here. The bombs deployed are designed to explode twenty feet into the ground. We’re ninety feet down.”
Susan’s secret room was definitely more than twenty feet below ground. Kyle jumped up and ran away. “I gotta go.”
No one tried stopping him as he dashed across the office, toward the back where the colonel’s office remained unattended, the dead Exall on the ground in front of it. He barged in and swiped the phone from his desk, a flood of relief sweeping over him as he dialed his mother.
It rang once and cut to silence. He dialed again, getting the same result, his face flushing with rage. He dialed his dad, Mikey, and Jimmy, all to no avail. It always rang once before cutting away to silence.
“Oh my God, no. Please God, no,” Kyle cried, eyes ballooning with liquid. He opened Facebook to try sending a message through the app, but the gray circle just spun in circles as it tried to load, the rest of the screen remaining a blank white. “Oh, fuck.” His fingers glided as they opened a web browser, trying to load all of his favorite websites, getting nothing but more blank screens in return.
Kyle threw his phone to the ground, its case splattering in an explosion of plastic, and sprinted down the hallway toward the staircase that led to the game room. There were still no other Crew members, not that he expected any, but the sound of his heavy breathing bounced around the walls in a way that made him think someone else was running behind him.
He barged into the room and turned on the TV, praying a news station had coverage of the outside world. He flipped to CNN, Fox News, the local channels, and even ESPN for good measure. All channels were nothing but static.
He sat on the lounge chair, all feeling draining f
rom his legs, waves of heat radiating across his body and face as adrenaline pumped through his veins at an alarming rate. The phone lines were down, the internet cut off, the news stations obliterated into nothing. They were almost 100 feet into the Earth with no method of communication to the outside world.
Somewhere above their heads the United States was being bombed to pieces by its own military, and Kyle wondered how the events had transpired that led to this decision. Surely the death of Colonel Griffins had factored in, along with the massacre of the Pentagon, but who delivered that fateful news to the president?
An overwhelming sense of helplessness consumed Kyle as he considered what was taking place outside of these walls. Skyscrapers and office buildings were collapsing, people’s screams buried beneath smoke and rubble as their final moments were surely spent in terror, oblivious to what was happening. Kids in schools and daycares were silenced along with their futures, their care providers sheltering them with their own lives in a desperate, futile attempt to stay safe. Hospitals exploded, putting both an end to suffering and an end to lives that had just begun. All the innocence of day-to-day life ended with a ball of fire, the hustle and bustle of the United States falling immediately silent where no living creature could so much as utter a final breath. Neighborhoods with homes and trees and yards were now covered in gray ash. All of the monuments in the country, the tributes to history, good, bad, or ugly, were all gone. There was no longer a United States of America.
Kyle prayed his parents were safe, but knew better. His dad might have had a chance, considering his upbringing, possibly knowing the first signs of Plan D and able to take cover. But his mom wouldn’t have known. She would’ve been at work, running her restaurant and serving a lunch crowd who received death for dessert. He tried to shake the image of his mother buried under dead bodies and remnants of her own restaurant, but he simply could not. Is it really the end of the world if you survive it?
The future was as uncertain as it had ever been. They had no way of knowing what was going on in the rest of the world, alone on a mass of land of 3.8 million square feet. The thought was chilling, sickening.
And that’s when Kyle remembered perhaps the most disturbing truth of all. Sixteen hundred miles away in Denver, a living Exall remained strapped to a table far enough below ground to have survived any attack. That one Exall and laboratory housed the answers to a list of thousands of questions and would spark a thousand more, both regarding the past and the bleakly uncertain future.
With Colonel Griffins dead, Kyle was again the only person who knew about Sandra. He didn’t know who to trust out of the remaining Crew members, and was reluctant to tell any of them about this heavy secret just yet. As soon as possible, Kyle would have to return home, dig his way through a lifetime of memories, and sift through the secrets trapped in that underground room, the fate of humanity relying on him.
A Poisoned Mind - Free Download
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Author’s Note
When I published Followed Home in 2016, I didn’t have plans at the time for a sequel. It was my very first book, and I was still learning the ropes of this industry. Now, nine books later, I have much more direction behind everything I do. If you happened to read these books back-to-back, you might wonder if they were written by different authors, but I can assure you it is all me! Writing is like anything in life, you can put in time and practice to become better. It is also a craft, which isn’t something as straight forward as learning, but rather developing more knowledge and pushing your personal limits to try new things. I am nowhere near the same writer I was nine books ago, just like I’ll surely be different nine books from now. I’ve learned so much in these last four years, that I’m pleased to have this sequel to really flesh out the universe and characters in more depth. Also, the story ends with a setup for a third (and final) book of what will be a completed trilogy. Look for that in 2021.
I want to take a moment to thank the team that works tirelessly behind the scenes for every book. First, my editor, Stephanie, for her fantastic work in polishing off another one of my books. This was our fifth book together, and I feel we’ve reached a point where we are on the same page with how each other works on projects. Thank you to Dane Low from ebooklaunch.com for another brilliant cover design. Having a solid cover is half the battle in trying to sell a book, and Dane has never let me down.
Thank you to the Dizzy Dragons, my close-knit community of author friends. We always push each other both as writers and business owners.
To my Advance Readers team. You guys play a huge role in helping the launch and consequential marketing for all of my books. Thank you for being such fast and honest readers.
Lastly, thank you to my wife, Natasha, for always keeping me motivated and moving forward. We’re getting so close with every book release, and we’re at the point where we can honestly ask “will this be the book that makes our dreams come true?” And of course, Arielle, Felix, and Selena, for keeping me balanced in this career that is so chaotic at times. I love you!
Andre Gonzalez
3/22/19-5/27/20
Also by Andre Gonzalez
Wealth of Time Series:
Keeper of Time (Wealth of Time Series, Book #4)
Bad Faith (Wealth of Time Series, Book #3)
Warm Souls (Wealth of Time Series, Book #2)
Wealth of Time (Wealth of Time Series, Book #1)
Road Runners (Wealth of Time Series, Short Story)
Revolution (Wealth of Time Series, Short Story)
Insanity Series:
The Insanity Series (Books 1-3)
Replicate (Insanity Series, Book #3)
The Burden (Insanity Series, Book #2)
Insanity (Insanity Series, Book #1)
Erased (Insanity Series, Prequel) (Short Story)
The Exalls Attacks:
Followed East ( Book #2)
Followed Home (Book #1)
A Poisoned Mind (Short Story)
Standalone books:
Snowball: A Christmas Horror Story
About the Author
Born in Denver, CO, Andre Gonzalez has always had a fascination with horror and the supernatural starting at a young age. He spent many nights wide-eyed and awake, his mind racing with the many images of terror he witnessed in books and movies. Ideas of his own morphed out of movies like Halloween and books such as Pet Sematary by Stephen King. These thoughts eventually made their way to paper, as he always wrote dark stories for school assignments or just for fun. As an international bestselling author, Andre hopes to keep others awake at night with his frightening and thought-provoking tales. The world we live in today is filled with horror stories, and he looks forward to capturing the raw emotion of these events, twisting them into new tales, and preserving a legacy in between the crisp bindings of novels.
Andre graduated from Metropolitan State University of Denver with a de
gree in business in 2011. During his free time, he enjoys baseball, poker, golf, and traveling the world with his family. He believes that seeing the world is the only true way to stretch the imagination by experiencing new cultures and meeting new people.
Andre still lives in Denver with his wife, Natasha, and their three kids.
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