“I’m so sorry.” Chin quivering, the boy—who couldn’t have been more than fourteen—eased his fallen leader to the ground. While his soul longed to speak words of peace to usher her into oblivion, the teeming beasts rustling closer would allow no temporary reprieve. With the blood of those he’d fought alongside splattered all over him, Houston retreated into the pod.
As the lid hissed shut, the humanoids surged. Banging on the lid, they slapped and kicked at the sleek lines of the ship, ravenous in their hunger to claim its cargo. His fingers numb with shock, the rookie punched in the launch code with his knuckles. Suddenly pinned to his seat by the lurch of blastoff, Houston was powerless to do anything but watch through the pod’s small window as the blaze of ignition melted the creatures’ flesh to the bone. He squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the sky to welcome him home.
The bunk hall was silent.
Tears zigzagged down the faces of many.
Cadet 1215 sat on her bunk with her legs curled under her, hair still damp from the shower. She, along with the others, stared at the wall-sized monitor in shock as the traumatic end to the current A-5 team played out on the screen that broadcasted their mission simulation.
The door at the far end of the barracks slid open, granting entry to an Undertaker. The rest of the universe knew them as Handlers, who tended to the every need of the chosen five. It was the cadets that granted them the ghoulish nickname, since the Undertakers only showed their faces in the barracks when a team member died.
Breath was sucked from the room in a collective intake as the Undertaker moved across the floor in silent steps. Its face was made to resemble a human female, while the rest of it was a seamless machine of robotic mastery. Stopping in 1215’s cluster, the expressionless android tapped a code into the display on its forearm. It paused for confirmation, then addressed the trainees with a preprogrammed smile. “Cadet 1215?”
While exhaling relief at their own expense, the faces around her creased with empathy.
1215 unfolded her legs and slid from her bed.
“Yes, ma’am.” Holding her head high, like she had been trained to since she was old enough to stand without wobbling, 1215 ignored the leaden weight of dread rolling in her gut.
“Wristband, please,” the Undertaker requested in a monotone cadence, holding up the scanner on its palm. A quick blip confirmed the cadet’s identity. “You are to collect your belongings and report to the Apocalypse Five Barracks by no later than oh-six-hundred. You have been promoted. Congratulations.”
Its gears purring, the Undertaker turned and strode to the door with a purposeful stride. Its pseudo-muscles were precision silicone, its joints flawless titanium.
A million questions flooded 1215’s tumultuous mind. Only one prompted her to call out to the messenger sent to bestow her with what many deemed a badge of honor—one of a long-awaited identity all her own, distinguishing her as more than just a number in a sea of faces. “Wait! Do … do I have a name?”
Pulling up short, the Undertaker’s head tilted with a robotic jerk. The code to 1215’s file streamed behind otherwise humanesque eyes. “Indeed, you do. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Detroit.”
Chapter Two
Thirty-Six Months Later
The world was ablaze.
A blood red sky hissed with crackling flames. Ravenous jaws of red and orange devoured every tree they encountered and belched out black blooms of smoke in a stifling fog. Clad in a black Lycra suit and thigh high boots, Detroit rose from her pod. Lifting her chin, she scanned the scene. In her mind, she could practically hear the thunderous rock crescendo that would thump through the AT-1-NS space station as all of its residents tuned in for the A-5’s latest mission.
“Look alive, Dee! We got a rager!” Juneau darted in at a full sprint. Without breaking stride, she played to the camera mounted on Detroit’s helmet by pivoting on her heel and shooting a wink from behind her own oxygen mask. Expertly styled auburn curls bounced around her face in their own untamable blaze as she ran.
Juneau’s twin brother, Reno, trailed a few paces behind her. While he lacked her enthusiasm for their roles, fear for her safety spurred him to stay close. The thirteen-year-old pair had joined the team eighteen months prior, after a tsunami scenario wiped out former teammates Vegas and Montgomery.
A ginger like his sister, Reno’s pale blue eyes blinked up at Detroit with a calm concern well beyond his years. “Are you burned? I have a pack of Aurora Aloe if you need it.” Reno dutifully held the label toward the camera, paying their sponsors their dues.
Detroit couldn’t help but feel protective of the neophytes. They had yet to be jaded by the brutality of their station. Things like camera angles and sponsorship spots still mattered to them. Detroit had only been only a year older than them when she was plucked out of the barracks. Since then, she had orbited the sun three times and seen things that still haunted her nightmares.
“Save that. No doubt we will need it.” Tapping the button on the side of her helmet, the world around Detroit became a digital readout that allowed her to see through the landscape in search of heat signatures. She had turned a half-circle in her cursory evaluation when a strobing yellow silhouette appeared only an arm’s distance away.
“Wind direction is forcing the fire to the south, Captain, sparing everything to the north.” Clicking back to regular display, Detroit found Augusta—Auggie to the A-5ers—clicking away at the sensor on his wrist. His hair was twisted into a mohawk with dreads, and his milk chocolate skin offset a bright white smile that made girls throughout the metropolis space station swoon. While the two of them had joined the team at the same time, Auggie was a year older than her—a fact he repeatedly brought up since she was named team leader over him. The word captain never left his lips without a slathering of sass that made it sound like a cuss. His tracker monitor in hand, Auggie kept his expression stoic for the attentive audience back at home. “That is the good news. The bad news is that there is a village containing roughly twelve hundred lives in that same direction. It’s my determination that saving them is today’s mission.”
“There’s more than that.” Reno flipped his hair from his eyes with an annoyed huff.
While their Undertakers encouraged them to be pillars of fashion, the looks seldom translated well into simulations without being exceedingly bothersome. Detroit’s boots were a perfect example. Whoever thought that was okay had never outrun a nuclear blast scenario.
“Look at the wafts of green in the flames.” Reno pointed into the distance. “That’s a chemical agent. I’m guessing it’s capable of much worse than torching an unsuspecting town.”
Having realized she didn’t have back-up, Juneau swiveled back to join her team. “Oh! Does that mean zombie apocalypse?” Clapping her hands, she bounced on the balls of her feet. “I love those! Embrace the chaos!”
Reno tried to shrink Juneau’s enthusiasm with a sideways glare that couldn’t penetrate her bubble of blissful enthusiasm. “The last time we played that one out, you got cornered in a roomful of undead. On behalf of all of us, we would like to avoid a repeat performance.”
“We need to contain it, before it comes to that.” The timbre of Houston’s voice was a gentle caress down Detroit’s spine.
She fought the desire to look his way, for fear of anyone watching and reading into so much as a glance. Not that there was anything happening between them, but what if she stood too close? Stared too long? Then again, wouldn’t it be just as odd if she didn’t acknowledge his arrival at all?
Forcing her face into a mask of indifference, Detroit tossed her chin-length bob and let her stare casually sweep up the length of him. Time and determination had swelled Houston from scrawny rookie to chiseled soldier. His once buzzed haircut now fell to his chin in a tangle of mahogany waves. At a glance, he appeared the pinnacle of strength and fortitude. Only those who dared to look closer would see the glimmer of sorrow and regret that clouded his russet stare.
�
�Talk to me.” Slapping his elemental trace rifle against his palm, Houston squared his shoulders. “What options of containment do we have available?”
“Why go in search of a solution, when one is already here?” With nearing flames knocking the temperature up to stifling, Juneau tightened their huddle.
“It’s getting a little toasty in here for riddles, June-bug,” Detroit pointed out, taking a deep drag off her oxygen mask.
Juneau jabbed her thumb in the direction of the rugged crag crowning the plane behind them. “That is not a mountain.”
Lips screwing to the side, Augusta’s brow pinched tight. “It’s doing a stellar impression of one.” The smile he tossed to the camera contained the radiance of a full lunar spectacle on a cloudless night.
“Aren’t you the structure and engineering guy?” Juneau cocked her head. “It’s upsetting that I have to spell this out to you.”
“For Saturn’s sake, Juneau!” Reno’s face reddened to match his hair. “This isn’t a game! We die here, we die for real. If you have something worthwhile to say, say it. Otherwise, let’s take the failed mission and get out of here!”
Rolling her eyes with an indignant huff, Juneau jabbed her thumb toward the wall of rock behind them. “That is a dam. Granted, I’m still a borderline neophyte, but an untapped water supply in the middle of a wildfire seems a pretty big advantage in our favor.”
Adjusting his oxygen mask, Augusta eyed the structure. “You wouldn’t happen to have a rocket launcher under that Lycra, would you?”
“It just so happens that I do.” The corners of her eyes crinkling, Juneau pulled two vials from the utility belt slung around her hips, careful to keep them far from each other. “Of the chemical sort.”
Before any of them could question her further, Juneau palmed a vial in each hand and sprinted in the direction of the dam.
“Anyone else bothered by the fact that she keeps explosives on her like lip balm?” Reno’s face folded in frustration as he begrudgingly took off after her.
“So, we aren’t discussing these things anymore?” Augusta shouted after them, squinting to see through the billowing smoke. To the others, he mused, “The plan now is just to follow the suicidal redhead without question?”
“Oh, there will be a whole slew of questions. Count on that.” Jerking her head for the rest of the team to follow, Detroit darted after the twins.
Stone steps had been carved into the right side of the rocky elevation, leading up to the towering crest. Taking the stairs two at a time, the three elder team members sped to close the distance between them and their baby-faced counterparts. They caught up to the twins at the precipice. A descent to a fiery death loomed on one side, a watery grave on the other.
“You got us here. Now, what’s the plan, kids?” Houston demanded. Hands on his knees, he sucked in a greedy lungful from his oxygen pack.
Seated on the edge of the dam with her legs swinging carelessly against its face, Juneau clipped her grappling belt around her brother’s waist.
She said something, but what it was, Detroit couldn’t say. The team leader tuned out, lost in the scene splayed out before her. Not the rampaging flames, but all that lay beyond it. Beneath the water, enormous turbines churned energy back to the nearby civilizations. Detroit couldn’t help but wonder why simulation designers would put such detailed focus into a part of the mission they couldn’t be sure the team would even see. It played no real part in their scenario. Yet, there it was.
“Detroit!” Augusta’s shout snapped her from her reverie, whipping the team leader’s head around. “Would you please talk to her? Or kick her off the dam before she kills us all? Honestly, at this point I would settle for either.”
“No one is going to get killed!” Juneau batted the suggestion away like a bothersome insect. A beat of hesitation and she reconsidered, “Or, at least, we shouldn’t.”
Auggie tossed his hands up in the air, then let them slap to his sides in frustration. “That’s very reassuring. Thank you.”
Juneau’s stare swiveled in Detroit’s direction, the corners of her heart-shaped lips tugging downward. “It’s not that risky! I’m just going to rappel halfway down the dam, then mix this tube with the other one …” She demonstrated by holding up one vial then the other. “Together, they make a liquid explosive equal to TNT. It makes the dam go boom, the water gushes over the flames, and POOF! We have ourselves a successfully completed mission.”
Detroit cast her stare toward the blaze that was devouring the landscape with merciless intent. “What happens when you set that thing off with you dangling beside it? We watch you spiral into a backdraft of waiting flame?”
“That’s not how a backdraft works,” Houston chimed in. Squatting down, he double checked Juneau’s grappling hook.
“Not the point,” Detroit spat to silence him.
Juneau offered her team leader a toothy grin. “That’s the part where you all are going to need to hurry and pull me up.”
Catching Juneau by the elbow, Detroit dragged her to her feet. “You need to stop this. We will find another way, or we’ll abort mission and suffer through a week of punishment exercises.”
“Yeah, that’ll be great. I haven’t run until I puked in quite a few moon cycles. I could use the cleanse.” Auggie nodded in mock exuberance, the tips of his short dreads bobbing with the motion. The A-5 helmets were fastened on with straps to allow their hair to always look its best. After all, what was the point of saving the world if you didn’t look fine as hell for the cameras?
“They’re right, June-bug.” Despite his argument, Reno held tight to the nylon rope his sister had thrust into his white-knuckled grip. “This is a stupid risk you don’t have to take.”
Shouts rang out in the distance, rising up in a nightmarish chorus coming from the village they were sworn to protect.
“Hear that?” Holding up one finger, Juneau’s head tilted as she listened. “Those people think otherwise.”
“Those people aren’t real!” Detroit countered, jamming her hand in the direction of the panicked ruckus. “All that’s out there is digital programming meant to train us or kill us. Don’t give them a chance on the second option. They will take it. I’ve watched it happen.”
Her eyes flashing with challenge, Juneau’s stare lobbed from one to the next of her teammates. “They may not be real, but tomorrow’s victims could be. That could be the day when we’re all called in for the real thing. It could be this exact type of situation, and we’ll have no idea what to do because we were too scared to try. On AT-1-NS, my special instruction has been in chemicals and explosives. Let me use what I’ve learned. Imagine this is real. Pretend it’s the one. The fate of the Earth lies with us. Isn’t a little risk worth the lives of all those trusting us to protect them? The mission before all else, right?”
Houston glared at the vials, resenting anything or anyone that dared threatened his team. He could practically hear their audience back on the starship hooting their approval for the selfless ginger. “What lesson are we teaching them if you die? If they watch you make a reckless choice, which gets you killed, it will shake their confidence in all of us.”
“Well, then I guess I’ll have to do my best not to die.” Taking a casual step back, Juneau threw her arms out wide and fell back in a reverse swan dive off the dam’s edge.
Sucking in a shocked gasp, Reno braced his footing and seized the rope tight. It skimmed over his skin, rubbing angry red gashes in his flesh until the grappling hook caught with a lurch.
The tendons of his neck bulging, Reno’s expression remained neutral. “Check on her.”
While Auggie grabbed the rope to take some of the strain off Reno, Houston and Detroit darted to the drop-off. Peering over the side, they found Juneau swinging back and forth mid-way down the dam’s stone face, beaming up with a victorious grin.
“I would stand back if I were you,” she called. She tapped a button on the side of her oxygen mask, and it hissed out into a f
ull protection helmet.
Juneau didn’t wait for them to move before pouring one vial into the other. The chemicals reacted on contact, foaming and bubbling in an expanding eruption. Slapping it against the dam, she kicked herself off the concrete blockade, swinging at a sharp angle to the right. “Pull me up! Pull me up!”
“Oh, now she’s worried about her own well-being,” Detroit grumbled under her breath. Clasping a hand onto Juneau’s rope, she tugged her toward the stairs. “This way! Move!”
Footsteps pounded over trembling rock as the team bolted toward their escape. There was a high likelihood they were bouncing Juneau off the rock wall as they ran. Oddly enough, they were okay with that.
As if noticing that very same thing, Juneau’s voice wafted up from below. “Things are about to get really loud down here! Now would be the time to quicken pace!”
“Look who’s suddenly concerned about being close to the explosion,” Detroit barked in response.
The nylon rope snagged on the edge of a jutting rock, forcing them into an abrupt halt. It took the combined force of the entire team—four pulling, one throwing her weight—to pop it free.
“Don’t try to insert logic into her thought pattern,” Reno grunted, face reddening to match his hair. “It’s pointless. Like blowing up a dam while we’re standing on it!”
The first explosion furthered his point, ripping the ground from beneath their feet in a stomach-lurching buck. Stumbling to regain their footing, they bent their knees to absorb the shock and waited a beat. When no aftershocks followed, they sprang back to immediate action.
Mid-stride, the second strike hit. Rock cracked with a thunderous boom, water spraying from a divot webbing through the foundation.
“Get off the rubble, or become the rubble.” The muscles of his chest rippling with strain, Houston gave Juneau’s tether a forceful yank. Hooking the slack around his elbow, he sprinted toward salvation.
Apocalypse Five: Archive of the Fives Book One Page 2
