by JT Sawyer
He forced his eyes open and looked down at his deep brown, weather-beaten hands, then leaned his forehead against the glass, trying to ease the tension in his shoulders. As he struggled to unwind, he heard the familiar voices of Pete and Talia in the hallway. He pulled himself away from the vista and walked out the door.
“Hey, where are you two headed?” he said to their backs.
“Looking for you actually,” said Pete. “Talia here was just filling me in on yet more things I didn’t know about you.”
Travis gave her a dismissive scowl then looked at Pete. “I’d be careful what this one says—she’s been known to deceive a man more than once.”
“Now, now—be nice, Trav. I was only recounting some of the tight spots we’ve been in before and how you always manage to come through despite yourself,” she said, then ran an eye over Pete before turning away. “I’ll let you two talk. I’ve got some work to do. Logan did say he wants you to come by his office shortly.”
As she walked away, Travis noticed Pete couldn’t remove his eyes from her athletic figure. “I’d watch out for that lady, my friend. She’s a sultry tempest who leaves few men alive in her wake.”
“It’s actually a lady that I wanted to talk with you about.”
Travis motioned his friend to walk with him away from the noise of the nearby medical station. “What’s on your mind? Is this about Becka?”
“No. It’s actually about my sister, Megan. She lives not far from here in Idaho—or at least she used to live there. I was thinking of sticking it out here for a while and then making my way up there with one of Logan’s units. He said they have an outpost up in eastern Idaho near Rexburg that they make monthly runs to. That would put me about sixty miles out from where she’s at.”
Travis stood with his arms folded. “I see. Well, I can’t blame you. I remember you telling me about how close you two used to be.”
“I know I said I’d finish this thing with you and spend time with you and your son…”
Travis interrupted, placing his hand on Pete’s shoulder. “Amigo, you don’t have to say anything else. I know how strong the pull of family is.” He sighed and took a deep breath. “You’re my family too, Pete. I’m just damn sorry I’ve kept so many secrets from you all this time. It’s been tearing me up inside. I just hope you can forgive me one day.”
“Half of me gets it, man. I do. From what I know, that kinda work requires you to live a double life. The other half of me feels like slugging you in the gut, though.”
“So why don’t you? Go ahead, please do. I’d feel better.”
“Because there’s too long of a line,” said Pete, whose expression was softening.
Travis let out a smirk, which caused Pete to grin and coaxed a faint laugh from both men. “Besides, punching you might cause some of those Ninja reflexes to throw me into a wall or twist my head off,” Pete said, smacking Travis on the arm.
“A friend with an understanding heart is worth no less than a brother,” said Travis.
Katy was walking up towards them as they turned in her direction. “I don’t see a black eye on Travis yet, Pete. You lettin’ him off easy?”
“Pete’s heading to Idaho so his absence and the loss of his fine cooking are going to cause suffering enough.”
“What do you mean—Katy’s a great cook. She’ll prevent you from starving on your own.”
“I didn’t think the legendary Travis Combs, who is part demi-god, needed to eat the food of mortals to sustain himself,” she said with a chuckle. Pete started laughing again while Travis stared wide-eyed at them both. “What? Did I miss something?”
“Just the inscription on the savior’s plaque,” Katy said, holding back her laughter, then she entwined her arms through both of theirs as they walked down the hallway together.
Chapter 24
As the helicopter circled around Pallas’s clandestine research facility on the southwestern edge of Colorado Springs, Nikki kept her pistol trained on the pilot. The man’s pale hands nervously twitched as he steadied the controls in their approach to the rooftop landing pad on the five-story building. The entire structure was made to appear like an abandoned warehouse with faux boarded-up windows and derelict vehicles scattered around the parking lot. Lining the perimeter, and obscured by artificial foliage, was a ten-foot-high electrified fence with a razor-wire border. This kept out the hundreds of undead creatures staggering around the woods.
Nikki finished zipping up the flight suit she had taken off the dead crew member while keeping her pistol trained on the pilot. ““Relax, I’m not gonna kill you. You may be the only ticket my sister and I have out of this place, so you’ve got plenty of sand left in your hourglass.”
The thin man swallowed with difficulty and tried to let out an exhale. “There doesn’t appear to be anyone down below,” he said, nodding to the roof. As Nikki turned slightly to look, his right hand slid down to the distress alarm in the center console.
“Now, after all my sweet talk you still want to double-cross me?” she said, smacking him hard in the shoulder with the butt of her pistol. “That just hurts my feelings.” She smiled as the man winced. “Take us down and I’ll be on my way.”
The helo descended, coming to a soft landing on the designated platform. The pilot took his hands off the controls and began massaging his injured shoulder. Nikki grabbed a pack off the floor between her feet and held it up to the man’s side while pressing the pistol into it. “Here, this will help ease your pain,” she said, firing two muffled rounds into the bulbous pack, killing the man.
She leaned forward and removed his flight helmet and slid it over her head, grabbing the remaining magazines from the dead pilot and tucking them into her flight suit. Then she lowered the smoke-colored visor on her helmet and opened the door, stepping onto the asphalt roof.
Nikki calmly strode across the salt-and-pepper shingled flooring and descended the stairs to the fifth floor. She kept her helmet on as she moved past two armed guards standing near the elevator. Nodding at them, she went inside and punched in the numeric code for accessing the third sub-floor beneath the main level. A few minutes later, the doors opened and she entered a long corridor with a series of laboratories on the left side and four offices on the left.
Crowley’s office was the last door at the end of the hallway, flanked by two guards. Several research staff were meandering down the corridor towards her. She kept her focus forward as they walked by. Then, Nikki stopped to glance through the second lab window, which had a pressure-sealed door and security keypad on the wall. She strained to see through the tinted visor on her helmet and into the room where her sister lay in a coma. It was too dark and she raised the ballistic nylon visor to get a better view. When she had last been here months ago, Marina was in a glass holding tank suspended in saltwater with a respirator and feeding tubes.
She pressed her helmet closer to the glass but the room wasn’t illuminated enough to see more than a few feet inside. She would have to risk entry. Nikki had to know what condition her sister was in. She looked down the hallway at the guards, who were speaking with a young woman in a white lab coat.
Nikki inched forward and was about to press the numbers on the security keypad but heard a voice to her right as one of the guards moved towards her. “That room hasn’t been decontaminated yet from the last occupant,” said the large bald man as he stood alongside her, scanning the name on her flight suit.
“The last occupant—you mean Marina? This is her room, isn’t it?”
“It was until twenty-four hours ago when she was disposed of,” the tall man said, looking down at her. “Can you tell me who you are and what you’re doing here? Flight personnel aren’t usually down on these floors.”
Nikki’s posture stiffened and her mouth slackened. The man’s last sentence was lost on her as she struggled to process the words. The glass window on the lab before her seemed to be warping as the sides of her head pressed in like water on the ruptured hull of a
sinking boat. She barely noticed the man reaching for his Taser as she fathomed the gut-wrenching implications of the words. She tried to swallow but couldn’t. Tears began forming in the corners of her eyes. Tears she couldn’t control. Tears that pushed up a constricting feeling in her chest. Marina…dead? How is she dead? Marina… She struggled to think as her rational mind was stripped away, revealing a reptilian anger. She shuffled back a step with clenched fists, feeling her fingernails bite into her palms.
She turned to face the man while leaning her head forward to remove the black helmet. As he began raising the Taser, she flung her head back, revealing her face, just long enough to startle the guard. “Nikki!” he said as she slammed the helmet across his jaw, sending him reeling into the wall. Then she struck him across the skull as he fell, and removed her pistol, sending two rounds into the other guard and another into the forehead of the nearby woman. She heard other people behind her screaming as they fled, followed by the shriek of an alarm resounding off the walls.
Three more guards burst through the door at the end of the hallway ahead. Nikki moved forward, sending a hail of rounds into the first two men as she weaved towards them, dropping the third man as he was raising his MP-5 at her. She did a reload and grabbed two of the rifles off the fallen bodies before running over to Crowley’s door, glaring up at the overhead security camera.
As she raised her fist to pound on the surface, she heard a man’s voice on the other side. “Nikki…Nikki…this wasn’t my doing. Sinclair gave orders to have you both terminated once your mission was reported a failure. He was the one who did this, not me.”
The door on Crowley’s office was thick enough to withstand a few rounds from her weapon but logic was far from her thinking as she raised the MP-5 and emptied the magazine into where the interior hinges were located, the bullets barely piercing the core. She slid in another magazine and continued while baring her teeth and screaming like a wounded animal caught in a trap.
A few hundred rounds later, the hinges began to surrender. She could hear Crowley inside shoving his desk and cabinets onto the floor. She kicked in the door and stepped aside, expecting the incoming volley of gunfire that slammed into the wall across from her. Once she heard the man’s weapon go empty, she bolted inside, leaping over the mangled desk and shooting Crowley twice in the left kneecap. Kneeling over him, she grabbed his hair and tossed her rifle down while removing a dagger from her leather boot.
“Where is she? Her body—what did you do with her body?” Nikki screamed while slicing the man across the cheek.
“Please…please…stop…the guards sent her down to the incinerator room. There’s nothing left, Nikki,” the man said in between shrieks of agony.
She heard the elevator doors in the hallway open and the clatter of many boots on the tiled floor. Nikki scanned the room and saw Crowley’s weapons cabinet in the corner, taking note of the magazines, grenades, and rifles. She slammed the man’s head down into the floor and yelled at him, grabbing her MP-5. “Look at me….look at me….” she said as she began shooting him in the arms and legs; he writhed around on the floor as if jolted by electricity. She kept firing until the weapon was dry and then crashed the butt of the rifle into his head repeatedly as tears streamed down her cheeks.
Then she stepped over his contorted figure and moved for the weapons cabinet, yanking a 5.56 Bullpup off the rack and racking a round while stuffing additional mags in her pockets. She pulled the pin from a grenade and tossed it into the hallway to her left. Not even waiting for the air to clear, Nikki walked out as the explosion rocked the walls, shattering lab windows and blowing the men into fragments upon the floor. She began firing wildly into those who remained, stepping over bodies and mangled limbs as she kept emptying her rifle into anyone in her path. When the elevator doors opened and revealed another stream of armed men, she continued shooting into the collapsing horde that was choking the entrance. As spent brass from her rifle clattered off the walls, the bullet-riddled corpses mounded up in the confines of the elevator while Nikki’s rage flooded through her like an unyielding wildfire scorching a parched hillside.
When her rifle emptied, she tossed it aside and began plunging her knife into the pile of bodies before her as blood showered upon her arms and face with each vicious stroke. She kept stabbing until her arms were too heavy to continue, gasping for air as the tiled floor beneath turned wine-dark. She stared up at the mottled ceiling, looking over its stucco pattern as if trying to discern some answers. “No beach to walk on,” she howled, thinking of her plans to retreat to a remote island with her sister. “No beach to walk on, Marina,” she yelled up as her powder-blue eyes issued forth tears that coalesced with the blood, forming crimson rivulets that ran down her trembling cheeks.
Chapter 25
Travis stepped into Logan’s office and found him feverishly writing in his journal. The room was surprisingly austere and had only a filing cabinet, two chairs, a weapons locker, a cot, and an immense map adorning the entire wall to his right.
“Come on in—I’ll be right with you,” said Logan, who was scrutinizing his report.
Travis walked over to the map and studied the myriad red circles and check marks that dotted the southwestern states. Each one had a sticky note beside it with Logan’s handwriting. Nearly every entry started the same: “Travis may have stopped here; Travis would have sought out this location; Travis wouldn’t risk such an exposed position.” The last scribbled note by Winslow caught his eye: “Travis alive! Thank God, he’s alright.”
Logan closed the faded brown cover of his journal and put his feet up on the edge of his desk, leaning back in his chair. “Damn glad I’ll no longer have a need to tack your name on that wall map.”
“Yeah, I’d like to avoid my information ever showing up on any sticky notes, checklists, or databases of yours again.”
“You delivered the vaccines and helped to unravel another piece of the puzzle. Now you’re done working for me once more, though I would like you to consider staying on and seeing this thing to the end. In case you hadn’t noticed, my list of talented operators keeps growing thin.”
“Not a chance,” Travis said, turning around and taking a seat. “My son in Denver beckons and has been my driving force all these months.”
“Todd? Is that his name?”
“Yeah. He’s ten years old. The last time I saw him was before my river trip. I’d told him I’d be home in a few weeks and we’d go elk hunting.”
“I remember you telling me about him. You had just gotten him a puppy, as I recall.”
Travis folded his arms across his green fleece jacket and was tapping his boot on the tiled floor.
“Very well. I’ll dispatch a team to accompany you there ASAP.”
Travis raised an eyebrow, staring at Logan. “Just like that—no other strings attached? ‘Good job, Trav—now catch a ride home.’ Come on, Logan—am I supposed to believe this is some kind of reward?”
“With the throes of winter upon the country, you can return here with your son and wait it out until the warmer months. You could help me train recruits for more strikes against the remaining Pallas strongholds and the coming offensives we will be launching in all the major cities in the US. We’ve got a helluva lot of RAMs to eliminate, and Montrose is going to be the forward staging area for the western states.”
“Extermination—what are you talking about? What about using the vaccine?”
“You can’t expect us to mass produce vaccines for everyone in the world. Only key personnel will be inoculated–—and their families, people like your son, for instance. Hell, we barely have the resources for even that.”
“You want me to stay put here for the next four months until spring arrives—screw that,” said Travis. “That’s easy for you to say since your family is probably in a secure bunker back east.”
“You’re right, Travis. My wife and daughter are in a safe place. My son never made it, though. He was killed during the first few week
s of the outbreak, savagely mauled by an RAM outside the house in front of his sister.”
Travis inhaled deeply and ran his hand over his head. “I’m sorry to hear about your loss. I didn’t know.”
“This is about more than you and me, Travis. Don’t you see? If we don’t get to the bottom of Pallas’s network, then what’s to say there won’t be another virus even worse than this in five years. These people won’t stop until their agenda is achieved and, as catastrophic as things are now, this viral outbreak fell far short of their original plans.”
“So you want me to saddle up with your Wild West show and go zipping around the globe again while my son is raised in this demilitarized zone? I don’t think so. I’ve been gone from him long enough. When I left the unit, that was it—I was finished then and I’m finished now. I inured myself to whatever suffering was necessary in order to make my way to Denver, to locate Todd and then find a place we can start over, away from all this,” he said, waving his hand around the room. “I have had many shattering experiences in war and this new world, and I will make it back to him no matter how long it takes.” Travis glared resolutely, his clenched jaw sending a ripple along his temples.
“So be it,” said Logan, leaning back in his chair. “But just to let you know that I am a man of honor, I’m going to fly you and your crew to Denver. From there, you’ll be on your own. It’s the least I can do after all you've been through. Anyone who doesn’t want to go is welcome to stay here.”
“What about Becka?”
“She needs to remain in quarantine until we can isolate what was going on with her and find out why she didn’t succumb to the virus. The shot that the doc gave her back at the lab seems to have lowered her fever but other than that, we’re not sure what the outcome will be. She’ll be taken care of, I assure you. Between her, Gummerman, and the Five Eyes organization there are many more layers to uncover.” He paused, pivoting his chair around to glance at the wall map. “Not to mention my East Coast units on the hunt for the secretary of biodefense. There’s no R & R in my schedule for months—or years.”
