by Ford, Lizzy
Lana smiled faintly and nodded, touched by his concern. The door closed behind her. She stood at the bottom of the hill leading towards the command center. It may as well have been a death march! She was sweating from the effort of walking out of the medical facility.
“Greenie sent me.” Elise’s voice came from the darkened parking area. Lana turned and smiled as the security specialist drove towards her in a cart. Her smile faded at the look on Elise’s face.
“What happened?” Lana asked.
Elise pursed her lips, and Lana was surprised to see her eyes water. “Someone wiped out everyone in the mountain.”
“What?”
Elise said nothing else, struggling to control her own emotions. Lana’s head spun at the news. She thought of Elise’s security detail and then of the Vice President, the President’s staff, the renowned scholars and businessmen taking refuge there.
They drove to the command center in anxious silence. It was quieter than a graveyard when they pushed their way in. The highest-ranking military members and civilian staff members were crammed into the small center, staring at the scene on the screen before them. Lana made her way through them to the general and followed his gaze. The cameras in the mountain showed a white haze hugging the ceilings and the unmoving bodies of the men and women in the mountain. She covered her mouth, horrified.
“We have a security breach,” the general said, his voice unsteady. “Lana, contact the central and western centers.”
Elise nudged Lana when she continued to stare. She all but dropped into the commo sector chair and issued mayday calls on the emergency net. Her left hand was numb from the drugs, her right hand trembling as she pushed the buttons. She checked the comms from the mountain and fed the decrypted messages back into the computer. Everything looked quiet, until she checked her micro again and saw that the decryption program had begun popping up the messages that had been repressed in the comms system. Lana was surprised to find that someone else at the Peak within the mountain had issued a similar mayday call.
A few days ago, the day Arnie had locked himself in the hub. It was one of many messages her micro had decoded. There were messages from Mr. Tim mixed in with messages from General Greene.
She glanced up at the screen, feeling uneasy about reading messages the dead man had sent.
General Greene is leading the Western insurgency. More attack imminent. Send help.
The words took her breath away. It had been addressed to the Peace Command Center—the site where peace had been declared and the new government created after the East-West Civil War—in Colorado. She punched the message closed and forwarded it to her micro before deleting it. Her gaze went to the general, who held tears in his eyes. The meds in her system, the weakness from her injury, the night itself was too much for her to digest fully. She discreetly began to dig through the other messages. With some dread, she hunched her shoulders to keep anyone from looking at her micro and opened those from Mr. Tim. Most were short phrases that looked like orders.
Attack imminent. Prepare, read the earliest one, sent the night he called to warn her. Peace CC is safest, read another. To her relief, nothing appeared too off with his messages, except the encryption. General Greene’s messages, however, made her sick to her stomach.
Lana read through one detailing the intent to attack using a secret weapon. It didn’t take much for her to realize he’d used one of the Horsemen. She stared for a long moment at the net code indicating that the receiver of the general’s messages was located in the West Control Center. Elise had said the PMF soldiers were fighting alongside hers, and that they’d seen soldiers in Western uniforms. It wasn’t just the injury and meds that made Lana’s head spin.
General Greene spoke finally, his voice jarring her out of her thoughts. Lana locked her micro.
“Elise, I need a team to go down and test the air. I want to know what this is, where it came from,” the general ordered. “Intel!”
“Sir!”
“Check your systems for threats, anything in the last twenty-four hours that seems out of place.”
“Lana.”
“Sir?”
“Stay here. Check all the systems and find that damn battalion we were expecting today!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Everyone out.”
Those in the room obeyed, too stunned to speak on their way out. Lana looked up at the scenes on the screens then at the general. He was peering closely at the people on the screen, as if trying to assess if there were any survivors.
Her instincts were at a clamor. Lana moved away from the commo computer and started systems checks on the others. She locked down all the systems and routed all the controls to her micro.
“Tell me you know where the rest of those keypads are,” General Greene said.
“Sir, I still don’t know where the others are,” she said in a tight voice.
“We gotta find ’em,” he said. “You okay?”
She looked down at her wrist. “I think so.”
“You did good.”
She turned to look at him. He offered a genuine smile she couldn’t bring herself to return. She nodded and looked down.
“If you need a break, take it,” he said. “The doc was pissed with me.”
“I will, sir,” she said.
He left, closing the ill-fitting door behind him. Her gaze went again to the keypads protected behind the titanium glass. She slumped on the infrastructure terminal, awaiting the results of the status checks. She flipped off the scenes from the mountain, unable to look at the destruction.
She felt like crying. Instead, she rose and stared again at the animated timeline, wishing her conclusions were something other than what they were. She looked at her micro and read another of General Greene’s messages. Her eyes watered.
PMF spies warning our Eastern adversaries in the government. Accelerate plans. Government will splinter once the attacks occur. The West won’t lose this war a second time.
One of the systems beeped. Lana tucked the micro in her pocket and crossed to it. It was the perimeter security check. The usual scan she ran came back normal. The administrator scan, which only the President or Vice President could run, came back with half a dozen errors.
In the past forty-eight hours, there had been fifty perimeter breaches, all from the west wall. All during a set time period when the security was disabled by someone in the command center. Her hand shaking, she checked the log to see it had last been accessed by General Greene twenty-five hours ago.
Not only was there a traitor at the Peak, but there were an untold number of insurgents lying in wait. Lana checked the general’s location, not surprised to find him at the west wall. She pinged Elise.
“I’m busy,” Elise barked.
“Can you bring me my anti-sleepers?”
“Give me an hour.”
Lana typed a message to Mr. Tim, telling him she was leaving and heading to the Peace Command Center, which was the first center beyond the Mississippi River. She moved to the emerops computer, struggling to hold back tears. She issued only a few commands, enough to lock them out to anyone but her. She was getting ready to pass the point of no return.
Brady returned from surveying the supplies in the well-stocked medical facility. He had a mental list of what they should take when they left. Unfortunately, there was nothing to quicken the healing of his neck. He’d heal four times faster than a normal human, but it wasn’t fast enough. He returned to the main medical bay, where he’d taken up a bed near Dan’s. Their gear was strung across three other beds, much to the doctor’s irritation.
“They’re all dead,” the doc said in a tight voice as he entered through the other door. “Antidepressants?” He held up the med-gun.
“What?” Brady asked, wondering if the doctor was already high. “Who’s dead?”
“Everyone. The VP … everyone.” The doc was slumped on one of the hospital beds. He prepped a med-gun for himself.
�
��What’re you talking about?” Dan rose and joined Brady.
“Gassed. Everyone hiding inside the mountain. It was supposed to be the safest place on the planet.”
Brady felt both surprise and some relief as the doc qualified his statement about everyone being dead. He looked at Dan, and the two shared a thought without speaking. They both reached for their combat suits and weapons.
“Doc, you got a real gun?” Dan asked.
The doc waved his med-gun.
“Something’s not right here,” Brady whispered.
“Yeah, it’s creepy,” Dan agreed.
His thoughts went to the injured woman he was charged with protecting. Whatever was going on, he hoped he had time to prepare his own men to evacuate before worrying about her. The majority of the Appalachia militia was at the base of the mountain.
“Doc, we’re taking supplies,” he said.
The doc was grinning and glassy-eyed after his med-gun shot.
Brady looked at Dan, who rolled his eyes. He strapped on his weapons and strode into the storage area, looking with admiration at the boxes of medical supplies.
“Jem,” he said into his communicator. “Y’all get ready to go and meet us here at the med center.”
“Roger.”
“Think we’re safer at our base camp?” Dan asked quietly, joining him in the storage room.
“I do.”
“When you wanna move?”
“Before dawn.”
Dan nodded and limped away, speaking into his communicator. Brady began to sort what supplies they needed and handed off a list to another soldier.
An hour before dawn, the alarms wailed. Brady froze and straightened from packing supplies, striding into the med center. The doc was asleep on one bed, his med-gun beside him. The rest of his men were awakened by the alarms.
“Doc!” It was the blond special security woman, Elise, who burst into the med center. “Doc!” She shook him awake. The doc sat groggily.
“What happened?” Brady asked. After watching the madman named Arnie last night, he knew better than to assume anything about the deceptively quiet Peak.
Elise gave him an irritated look, reminding him again of how little respected the army-types were.
“Doc, I need some meal bars, anti-sleepers, and pain killers.”
“You’re maxed out,” the doc said.
“Don’t give me any shit, doc! The walls were breached. I need ’em for the spec security guys. All of them.”
“When were the walls breached?” Brady asked.
Elise was agitated at more than him. She glanced at him then around at his men. An odd look crossed her face. She shook her head.
“Dammit, Lana,” she murmured with a look at her watch then barked, “Doc, hurry!”
“Lana’s the little girl who got shot, right?” Dan asked.
“The missing little girl who got shot,” Elise replied.
Brady moved forward at her words.
“She’s too naïve …” Elise drifted off.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“Aside from the whole mountain coming down and the Peak being overrun by God-knows-who?”
There was more. She wiped her face and whirled, following the doc into his office. Brady signaled his men to ready themselves. If what she said were true, the oasis around them was on fire.
“How bad is it?” he asked, following her. “Are you moving your men?”
“We’ll fight until Greenie gives the order to leave. God help me, I hope it’s soon,” Elise responded, stuffing the meds the doc placed on his desk into a tactical bag. “Anti-bacs, too, doc. Greenie’s holed up in the hub trying to figure out what to do.” She slung the bag over her shoulder.
Brady caught her arm. The pretty blond glared at him, but he saw the worry in her gaze.
“What happened?” he growled again. “I won’t ask you again.”
A look of incredulity crossed her features, and he doubted any army-type had ever threatened one of the elite class member forces. She wrenched away, saying, “Lana locked out all the systems and left.”
“Left the compound?” Dan asked, equally surprised.
“Yep. She’s somewhere out west over there,” Elise said with a wave of her hand towards the forest.
“How do you know?” Brady asked, suspicious.
Elise turned away and stormed off, supplies in hand. His instinct told him there was something else going on aside from the insurgents and Lana leaving. Lana didn’t have the mettle to survive the way he knew how. He doubted she’d ever seen blood before she was shot. What would possess her to leave the safety of the compound for the insurgent-infested forest?
“This ain’t right,” he said, his Southern accent plain even to his ears. “Get the teams ready. I have a feeling leaving here is going to be a pain.”
Chapter Six
LANA HAD DONE EXACTLY as Elise directed. She hugged the tree-line down to the side of the mountain then climbed a tree and waited. Daylight brought the sounds of gunfire and rockets on top of the mountain that didn’t cease even when night fell again. She checked the status of the systems from her micro and downed dehydrated meal bars and anti-sleepers. The painkillers didn’t work, and by noon, she had a pulsing headache and no idea how to change the leaky bandage around her wrist.
She stayed in her tree, waiting for Elise. She’d removed her personal identifiers, hacked into the government’s tracking mainframe to deactivate the implant in her brain, and changed into the black tactical uniform Elise brought her over her civilian grays. Elise promised to find her by dusk, and together, they’d go west, to the Peace Command Center.
Dusk came and went. Lana grew uneasy and watched the sky flare with rocket and laser fire from the battle at the Peak. She touched the small vault containing the Horsemen in her cargo pants and sipped water.
The forest below her rustled, and she froze. Someone was down there. Elise didn’t give the bird call they’d agreed on, so Lana said nothing. Suddenly, half a dozen well-armed men appeared below her. They headed towards the top of the mountain. Moonlight glinted off their weapons and gear. She watched them go, startled to witness the men in Western uniforms that Elise had claimed to see. Growing anxious, she turned her attention to the sound of the stream Elise had told her to follow if she didn’t make it there by dusk.
Lana hugged the tree, willing her friend to appear. She didn’t look forward to traveling alone into the valley where she’d last seen a sat image of what looked like a militia. Its size was camouflaged by the surrounding forest and technology.
Another hour passed. She grew cold and her injured arm hurt more and more. She slowly moved from her position and crawled down the tree with effort, the movement sending pain through her tender wrist.
She carried little else than the lockbox, her micro, and enough meal supps and anti-sleepers for two weeks. She had a laser gun, even if she couldn’t hit a target two feet in front of her. Elise was going to help her.
If she showed.
Lana’s heart skipped a beat, and she pulled out the tracker Elise gave her, starting through the forest towards the stream. She didn’t walk far before she heard the creak and snap of branches. She froze. After a moment of silence, she started forward again.
A dark form dropped in front of her. She gave a startled cry and fell back, barely escaping a hand trying to grab her. Lana scrambled up and ran, careening into another man in dark clothing. She wrenched away, terrified. A backhand sent her reeling. She dropped, her head ringing. She felt someone tie her hands and haul her up. She was slung over someone’s shoulder, stuck between awareness and blackness. Panic spun through her, and she didn’t know which she feared more: Greenie finding her or the insurgency.
She had no concept of time in the in-between place. They seemed to walk for hours, until the first rays of morning lightened the forest. The world around her changed from forest to what resembled an army encampment with tents and mobile buildings hidden from sight by in
tricate nettings woven among the trees. The sound of men and movement around her pulled her from the daze.
She was cold and stiff. They entered a tent, and she was thrown to the ground. She landed hard on her left side, pain flaring through her as her wrist twisted. It was enough to make her nauseous. She was hauled to her feet and she blinked, struggling to keep the pain at bay. A slap stung her cheek, and she gasped.
“What do we have here?” the man asked in an accented voice.
There were two men behind him, and they crowded around to see her.
“You don’t look like a spec ops soldier,” he said, referring to the black uniform Elise insisted she wear. “What’s your name?”
They were all three bioengineered soldiers, thick-bodied and towering over her. But they didn’t wear military clothing or symbols. The slapper’s sleeves were rolled, revealing an intricate tattoo of battle scenes around the letters PMF.
Insurgents. Her breath caught, and cold fear trickled through her.
Another slap.
“What’s your name, girl?” he demanded.
She stared at him, hand on her cheek where he’d struck her. He took each side of her collar and pulled, the effortless movement ripping the black uniform down the middle. His eyes went from the fed uniform to her face.
She tried to pull away, panic growing at the look that crossed his features.
“We got us a fed bitch.”
“I’ll tell the boss,” one said, ducking out of the tent.
The man before her snatched one arm and flipped out a knife, cutting through her black clothing and tossing it aside. He glared at her, then unbuttoned his tac gear, pulling his arms free and pushing it down to his waist to reveal the dark T-shirt beneath.
“I hate fed bitches,” the other said. “Elite think they’re so much better than us.”
“So do I.”
Shaking, she tried to pull away, to look away. The man in front of her spun her and gripped her neck with one hand. Her gaze went to the laser gun he’d tossed a short distance away. She felt him slice through her gray uniform with the other and tried to move away. His grip tightened, and she stopped.
