SALVATION
©2020 NATHAN HYSTAD & DEVON C. FORD
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Contents
Prologue
1. Alec
2. Dex
3. Lina
4. Tom
5. Cole
6. Dex
7. Lina
8. Alec
9. Cole
10. Lina
11. Dex
12. Cole
13. Two months after Occupation
14. Tom
15. Lina
16. Alec
17. Cole
18. Dex
19. Lina
20. Alec
21. Cole
22. Dex
23. Tom
24. Lina
25. Dex
26. Cole
27. Alec
28. Lina
29. Dex
30. Cole
31. Alec
32. Dex
33. Lina
34. Dex
35. Cole
36. Tom
37. Lina
38. Cole
39. Alec
40. Tom
41. Cole
42. Lina
43. Cole
Epilogue
FROM THE PUBLISHER
About Nathan
About Devon
Prologue
Six hours after Occupation
“Congressman,” the aide said as he poked his head around Travis Mason’s office door. “Your brother’s on line two. He warned you not to keep him waiting.” Travis frowned, retrieved his cell from his pocket, and looked at the screen as if expecting to see a list of missed calls from Tom. Seeing nothing, he snatched up the telephone from his desk and hit the button to connect the held call.
“Tom, what is it? I’m a little busy here…”
“You and me both, little brother,” Tom said without a trace of humor in his voice. “You need to find Elaine and get out of D.C. Now.” Travis paused, immediately disregarding the response that he had work to do. If Tom told him he needed to get his wife out of D.C., then it stood every chance of being far more serious than he realized.
“And go where?” Travis asked quietly as he sat, glancing up in response to another light knock at his open door. Waving the visitor inside, he continued his conversation.
“Yep. Uh-huh,” Travis said as he scribbled a note with the phone held to his ear with a shoulder. He smiled at the visitor as he sat, trying to put the Capitol policeman at ease when the young man was clearly worried. “Got it. See you soon.” He ended the call without waiting for a reply.
“Private First Class Soares,” he said with a smile and manners he seemed to summon despite the entire cabinet office building erupting in chaos. “How can I help you?”
He suspected he knew why Soares had sought him out among the panic, and the call he’d just terminated likely held the answers the man wanted. Soares had left the Marine Corps and trained as a Capitol policeman less than a year ago, but the man still retained a lot of that Marine mentality like many of them did. Almost as if it had soaked in and would take years to come out, if ever.
“Well, sir, I was wondering if you had news… well, the thing is, I was hoping you’d heard from the Colonel? From your brother?” Travis tapped a finger on the desk phone and smiled again, showing more outward confidence and calm assurance than he felt by a long way.
“As it happens, yeah.”
“And, might I ask, sir, what he says about…” Soares stopped talking as he twisted in his seat to wave a hand towards the muted TV screen. Both men watched the images, replayed over and over as every news outlet in the world found a scientist, a conspiracy theorist, or a whack-job to offer commentary and opinion as to what was happening. They watched in silence, seeing the latest images and footage of the massive ships breaking through cloud cover, each settling into an ominous hover over cities all over the world.
The tickertape across the bottom of the screen told them that sixty-three individual crafts had been confirmed worldwide already. Travis was glad that Elaine had travelled with him, as he planned to spend the next week and a half in D.C. instead of their Manhattan home. He didn’t want to be away from her so close to her due date and she didn’t want to be worrying with him a short flight or a long drive away if she went into labor.
Travis snapped out of it first, tearing his eyes away from the screen.
“Soares, what are your orders at present?” Travis asked bluntly.
“I’m your protection detail, sir,” the younger man answered with a little confusion.
“You have family in D.C?”
“No, sir,” Soares said with an emphatic shake of his head. “Just my mom back in Utah.”
“No girlfriend?” Travis asked. Soares darkened a little but kept himself under control as he shook his head.
Travis pulled the knowingly sympathetic smile he reserved for listening to people’s injustices. Lots of the staff hadn’t shown up for work that day, and even more had simply up and left when the UFOs broke atmosphere and started settling.
“So, if I were to leave the building and go somewhere, it’s a reasonable assumption that you had the time to accompany me?”
“I’m your detail, Mister Mason,” Soares said simply with a shrug.
“Good. Pack your gear because we’re going.”
“Going where, sir?”
“Virginia, by way of my apartment, to collect my wife.”
Soares nodded, glancing at the telephone on the desk as he recalled his unanswered question.
“My brother,” Travis said, “has unofficially recommended that our asses are no longer in the metropolitan area.”
The streets were chaos. Already the eastern view, obscured by clouds, held an ominously dark and foreboding shadow in the far distance. The trajectory of one of the ships was calculated to include the capitol, just as others had broken through the atmosphere and headed for London, Riyadh, Cairo, Seoul, Shanghai… the list went on. All major seats of power and all massive concentrations of population were in for a
visit.
Travis tried desperately to connect a call to his wife on his cell but gave up after the fifth attempt. He didn’t know if it was the ships causing some kind of interference or their own government dismantling the cell networks to prevent the spread of panic. It might be as simple as everyone trying to use the phones at the same time was clogging the system. He contemplated asking Soares for his opinion but decided against it; the man was concentrating hard on shuttling them through the traffic using the lights and sirens in the imposing SUV he controlled with pinpoint accuracy.
Soares got them safely to the apartment complex, which was mostly one massive building converted years ago into luxury flats exclusively for rent by those working in government. It was guarded, gated, and controlled twenty-four-seven, so when they drove through the gates to find nobody there, alarm bells began to ring.
“What the hell? Stay here,” Travis said to Soares as he reached for the door handle to let himself out. “I’ll find Elaine.” Soares put a hand on his arm and shook his head.
“We go together or not at all,” he said. “There’s no telling what whack-jobs will be triggered by this.” Travis relented, waiting for the former Marine to reverse park the SUV so it could drive straight out of the gates if they needed to leave in a hurry. Travis had no military or police training, but growing up with a father who taught him to respect firearms and an older brother who wanted to be a US Marine from the time he went to kindergarten meant that he had the knowledge to stay behind Soares as he approached the door fast and reached out for Travis’ access card.
He risked using the elevator, avoiding the stairs for Elaine’s health. They moved fast until they reached his floor. Travis pointed ahead when Soares looked at him silently to ask which apartment, indicating the first on the right. There were only four to each floor, all with ornate high ceilings and generously proportioned rooms, and Soares approached the front door to bang on it heavily with the side of his fist before using the keycard to gain entry.
Travis spilled inside, calling Elaine’s name as he went. She emerged, red-faced and stressed, from a bedroom with an armful of clothes she dropped into a suitcase. She ran to him as quickly as she could manage and threw her arms around his neck. He responded, leaning awkwardly over the very prominent baby bump where his twin sons were already kicking each other as a sign of things to come.
“I was so worried,” she gasped in between the kisses she showered him with. “The news kept playing the same things on a loop until about ten minutes ago.” Travis glanced to the TV to see a blank screen—blank apart from the thin dialogue window showing the legend “no signal.” He snapped himself out of his dark thoughts and turned to her with both hands on her shoulders.
“Tom called me,” he said as he peered into her tired eyes. “He said we should get out of he—”
A deep, thundering resonance stopped his words. It didn’t so much as make a noise of its own but instead cancelled out every sound in their world. It didn’t last long before the shaking began. Elaine screamed as Travis tried to help her to the sofa before she fell.
“We need to move,” Soares said. “Now.”
Travis nodded, trying to pull Elaine with him as the shaking dissipated.
“Come on, honey,” he said.
“The stuff,” she complained in shock. “My medication. We have to bring…” Travis slammed the lid of the suitcase and zipped it desperately as she looked around the room while he tried to explain that they had to evacuate the city fast. He knew she understood; that she wasn’t stupid or naïve by any measure, but he also recognized what fear and shock did to people.
He’d seen this kind of reaction in New York when he was a kid, witnessed the city brought to a grinding halt by events none of them had ever imagined possible, and he remembered which way people ran.
He knew he was one of those people who ran towards the danger, not away from it.
Pulling Elaine with him, he apologized that she had to take the stairs. She shrugged him off, no stranger to hard work, and once she’d collected herself, she didn’t complain. When they reached the last flight of steps, she made a noise of stifled pain and stopped, bending forwards at the waist before letting out a held breath in pain.
“Oh my god, not now… please not now. Not here. It’s too early! We need to get you to a Doct—”
“God dammit, Travis, you are such a drama queen,” she hissed as she stood slowly upright. “It’s my body, relax. I’m not having these babies arri—” The deafening low rumble happened again, cutting off her words. Travis braced his fingers on the handrail on either side of her and pressed his body into hers before the building shook harder than before—hard enough to dislodge plaster and dust from the high ceiling. Behind him, he heard Soares transmitting on his radio without getting a response, and by the time the earthquake stopped, he shot Travis a look of defeat and jammed the useless radio into his pocket.
“Dead,” he said as he pulled out his own cell phone to check the screen and tossed that too. Travis released the grip of his right hand and checked his own phone as he pressed the buttons on the side in a failed attempt to revive the black screen. He knew the battery was fine because he’d unplugged it not long before leaving his office, so something far more sinister had to be at work.
“Digital communications all dead?” he asked Soares as he helped Elaine onto the last few steps and bent to retrieve the dropped suitcase before pulling open the door to the parking lot. Any answer he could have given was drowned out by the shrieking whine of something buzzing overhead fast and low.
All three of them ducked instinctively before running for the vehicle. Twice more the same whining noise shot overhead, bringing with it a warm downwash as the dull, overcast daylight was blocked out.
Shouts, distant screams, and car alarms echoed through their hearing as they bundled inside. Travis, taking one last view to the eastern skyline, saw three shapes buzzing low over the city as flashes blossomed below them and the answering explosions took seconds to reach his ears. The engine fired up, throwing his theory about an electro-magnetic pulse being used to kill their communications—modern vehicles all operated on electronics and would be fried just as badly as any cell phone—and he watched in horror as more trios of alien ships hovered over the area and destroyed everything.
“Head west then south,” Travis said as he relayed the instructions from Tom. “Get to Woodbridge and there’ll be transport waiting.”
Travis leaned back to comfort Elaine, who cried quietly as they both watched the destruction being wrought on D.C.
“New York…” she said, her words drifting off as the horror sank in.
Travis thought that his whole world might be over. He replayed his brother’s words from the phone call in his mind again.
“This isn’t a drill, little brother. They’re not here to make friends or they’d have answered us. Hell, we’ve been sending them messages every way we could since they appeared in orbit four days ago and they’ve ignored every single one. I have a bad feeling about this, and I want you and Elaine out of D.C.”
The thought that the previous week he’d been preparing to talk about economic revivals in underprivileged areas made him almost laugh at how stupid he felt as he watched a flight of F-35s scream across the skies, only to be shot down with a derisive ease. That the pinnacle of their technology was swatted aside so nonchalantly spoke of their—the human race’s—pathetic inability to bring even the slightest fight meant that all of their superiority, all of their military might, stood for nothing.
They were being invaded by a far superior enemy, and no religious or cultural ideology meant a damned thing any longer.
Chapter 1
Alec
The air was electric today, dark clouds rolling in across the valley, sending birds searching for lower ground. Alec assumed precipitation was coming. It had rained nearly every day since they’d arrived, and he was growing tired of sitting around, waiting for the plan to be revealed.
Cole strode ahead, the coyote padding alongside the man. His brother. It was hard to imagine he had a sibling. If they didn’t look so much alike, he wouldn’t have believed the news. Even his walk was different than Alec’s; surefooted and straight-backed. It was the walk of a Freeborn, not an Occupation slave.
A flash of jealousy coursed through him as he watched Cole glide with ease through the brush along the ridge.
“What was it like?” Alec asked Cole. His brother seemed to have a destination in mind today but hadn’t shared it yet. A bow was slung over his shoulder, barbed wire looped over his belt.
Cole didn’t stop walking, and Alec had to duck to avoid a branch snapping back in his face. “What was what like?” Cole asked. His voice was deeper than Alec’s, as if it told a vastly different story than his own.
“Life. Being Freeborn. I still don’t know anything about you,” Alec said. It was the first time Cole had let him tag along on one of his hunting ventures. Lina had always stuck to him like glue, as if she would fall apart if Cole and the coyote weren’t nearby. Alec doubted that was true. She was scared, but he saw the strong woman below the surface.
Cole stopped, his dark eyes squinting. “What’s to say? We were born, then separated, and here we are. You can’t change the past.”
Salvation (Rise Book 2) Page 1
