Apocalyptic Visions Super Boxset (105 page)

***

The small town of Platinum, Alaska, had nothing more than a main road and an airport. Everything else that surrounded it was frigid tundra. The influx of U.S. troops had increased the town’s occupancy tenfold.

A light snow fell as Sarah pulled into the now-bustling town. People, houses, cars, all painted with a light coat of white dots clustering together in an attempt to completely take over whatever host it landed on. Sarah parked the Humvee next to the command post where they had waited after the flight.

Two guards stood outside and blocked her from entering. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but the commander’s reviewing some sensitive information. I’m going to have to ask you to get back in the vehicle and wait there.”

“It’ll just take a minute.” Sarah did a sidestep, and again the guard blocked her, mimicking her motions.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. No one is allowed inside. No exceptions.”

“What’s with the ‘ma’am’? Do I look like a ma’am? Do I have a crocheted sweater around my shoulders, hunched over on a walker, looking for a warm fire to rub my bunions by?”

The soldier looked to his partner, his slack-jawed face the only response he was able to muster. Sarah gave another sidestep then faked right, but the guard was fast enough to follow, giving the feel of an awkward dance-off that neither of them wanted to be in. “All right, enough of this shit.” Sarah snatched the soldier’s wrist and twisted it hard left, bringing the soldier to his knees. Before his partner could put his hands on her, Sarah spun around and brought her heel to the inside of his knee, causing the soldier to join his partner on the ground.

With the doorway clear, she jumped inside and slammed the door behind her before the soldiers could get off the ground. When she turned around, there were a number of snow-topped heads staring at her as she held her body against the door, holding off the two soldiers who were trying to break in at bay. “I know what you’re thinking and, no, I did not permanently hurt the two men outside. At least not physically. Emotionally maybe.”

The door finally gave way and shoved Sarah forward as the two guards barreled inside. They immediately went to grab her when Commander Fryson jumped in. “Enough! We don’t need any casualties before this thing starts. She can stay.”

“Yes, sir.” The two soldiers exited the building, giving Sarah a glare that had a hint of “fuck you” behind it. Sarah caught a glimpse of the map in the middle of the table where the officers had gathered as she picked up the small red case Bryce needed. She recognized the Alaskan coastline and could see figurines that looked like warships in the Bering Sea.

“Do you have what you need, Sarah?” Commander Fryson asked.

“Russians,” Sarah said.

“I’m sorry?”

Sarah invited herself over to the map, looking down at the outlines of war below. “The imported soldiers, the added artillery. You guys think Russia’s going to make a move. Ballsy.”

Sirens wailed outside, turning every head in the room to the door. The two guards from earlier burst in. “Sir, we have contact on the shoreline!” The room erupted into a massive scramble, with Fryson grabbing hold of Sarah’s shoulder.

“Get to Mack. Tell him what’s going on.” Before Sarah could object, she was thrust outside into the ordered chaos of war.

Hundreds of soldiers ran past her, creating twice as many footprints in the falling snow, which had picked up. The light drizzle had turned into a steady haze of white, swallowing anything and everything in its path. She looked over to the Humvee, knowing full well that she’d get bogged down in the trails on the way back, even if she left now. She brought her hand underneath her jacket and pulled out one of her pistols. “Well, might as well be useful.”

***

With no windows in the server building, Bryce and Mack couldn’t be sure how much snow was actually falling outside, but the howling winds gave it an ominous tone. Thankfully, the servers had booted up enough to the point of warming the room to where they could take off their jackets and gloves.

Bryce bounced his knee up and down nervously. He’d turned one of the computers he had inside out in an attempt to keep himself busy, but the pile of dismantled technology had lost Bryce’s interest. He sat there, curled up in a ball by himself, wondering when he’d have the same level of intelligence that had allotted him so much information. It was like a strange withdrawal that he was going through—he could even feel himself getting the shakes.

A few times, Bryce had glanced over at Mack, who was busy jotting something down on a sheet of paper. The man hadn’t looked up for more than three hours, and Bryce wasn’t sure if Mack even realized they were alone. The lines on his forehead seemed permanently creased in his concentration on the notepad in his lap.

Bryce didn’t like not being able to talk with Sarah. Granted, there were times when he wished he could shut her up, but the fact that she was out there alone made him uneasy. He’d gotten that feeling in Spain, and it had once again returned. His job was to see the things she couldn’t see. Hear the things she couldn’t hear. As fast and strong as she was, she couldn’t stop a bullet from a sniper in the back of her skull.

The fact that Sarah had been gone for as long as she had made Bryce uncomfortable. It’d only taken a little more than an hour to drive to the location, but he figured the storm was slowing her down. Finally, unable to take the silence any longer, Bryce spoke up. “What are you working on, Mack?”

The scrape of lead against paper continued between the howls of wind and snow outside, and Mack kept his head down, and the end of the pencil kept on with its jerky motions. Bryce reached over to one of the small circuit boards on the floor next to him, picked it up, then tossed it in Mack’s direction. The small board landed right on top of Mack’s notepad, and the scribbling stopped. Mack slowly raised his head and looked at Bryce with the same set of annoyed eyes that Bryce had seen being given to Sarah thousands of times. “You’re really lost in thought over there.”

Mack pushed the piece of circuitry off the paper and continued his writing. “What’s the status on the servers?”

“Uh, well, they’ve all gone through their start-up sequences, and all but one of them had no errors, but the glitch was easy to override, and now I’m just waiting for Sarah to get back so we can start the uplink to the satellite,” Bryce answered.

“How long will that take?”

“The initial installation will only take a few minutes, but establishing the link between these servers and the satellite could take a while. It’s a lot of data that they’ll have to upload. In fact, it’s thousands of terabytes of data. God, you know, when you sit down and really think about all the computing power we’re able to handle, it’s quite impressive. Did you know that the first computer system only—”

“Bryce?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Do you go on tangents like these with Sarah during her missions?”

“Um, well, sometimes. It’s not intentional.”

“I see.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I think I’m just beginning to understand some of her insubordination. I think it comes from having to listen to you.”

Mack finally looked up from his pad of paper, and Bryce frowned then turned away from Mack and returned to the computer pieces lying on the ground. He sheepishly picked up one of the pieces and kept his head down, muttering softly to himself. “And I can see why Sarah doesn’t listen to you.”

“What was that, Bryce?” Mack asked.

“Nothing, sir,” Bryce answered quickly.

***

Sarah’s boot crunched into a patch of crimson-stained snow and kicked up a flurry of red slush on her sprint toward the Humvee just before bullets impacted the other side of her cover. The blizzard hadn’t let up, and her fingers had gone numb from the cold. She no longer felt the sliver of metal under the skin of her trigger finger. Her ears, nose, and the tips of her hair were red and frozen stiff. Fire burned in her lungs with every breath. The bits of white falling against her eyes made it harder to see everything, including the Russians she was trying to shoot. The gunfire sounded like shattering ice in the cold. Everything was harsher in the deceptively soft snow.

One of the U.S. soldiers pinned up next to her jammed his palm into the magazine he was trying to load in the rifle. He smacked it three or four times, but it wouldn’t go in. Sarah snatched the rifle from him and slammed the end of the magazine into the Humvee door, where it clicked into place. When she handed the rifle back to him, she noticed that it was one of the same soldiers from earlier who had guarded the commander’s post. “Well, well, well, look who we have here.”

“Ma’am, you shouldn’t be out here right now.”

“Well, if I weren’t out here, who would have reloaded that rifle for you? Don’t worry, though,” Sarah said, gripping both pistols in her hands. “It’s not uncommon for men to have performance issues under duress.” He gave her another slack-jawed face that she’d seen before as she jumped out from behind the Humvee and into the storm of snow and bullets.

The Russians had landed just off the coast and had established a beachhead, where the U.S. military was trying to keep them contained until their ships were in a position to take them out. Sarah could see the boats the Russians had used to come ashore amid the floating chunks of ice crashing into the shoreline of frozen mud.

Hundreds of Russian soldiers had declared war on the United States the moment they set foot on that beach. The hostile move would no doubt send repercussions rippling through the rest of the world. Sarah just hoped that none of it would be nuclear.

The colder the air, the denser it became, causing her firearms to lose their accuracy and distance. The first few shots went wide left and right, but as she adjusted for the temperature, she started to hit her marks. With each pull of the trigger, the snow that fell and rested on the barrel shook off from the recoil of the shot.

Sarah worked her way up the battlefield, using the snow and the warming sensors in her boots as advantages. Once she made it all the way to the front lines, she slammed her shoulder against a glacier pack near a cluster of soldiers under fire. “So what’s the word from command?” Sarah asked.

The lieutenant looked back at her with a puzzled look until she shot two Russian soldiers advancing toward their position without him seeing it. That was enough to solidify her as a good guy. “We have a destroyer three miles out, ready to hit the target, but we need to get it marked.” He held up the targeting device. “This snowstorm is affecting the range of the laser. Someone would need to be right on them in order for the strike package to be delivered.”

“How close exactly would that be?” Sarah asked.

Bullets chipped off ice chunks from the cover of their glacier. The gunfire increased along with the snowstorm. The Russians were in their element.

“Less than fifty feet,” the lieutenant said, firing into the white abyss where the shots came from.

“That’s not gonna give me much breathing room,” Sarah muttered to herself.

“What?” the lieutenant asked, shouting above the gunfire, but before he received an explanation, Sarah ripped the targeting device from his hands along with his radio and sprinted toward the epicenter of the Russian invasion.

Massive pieces of ice and piles of snow extended from the earth, either growths from the rocks they covered or pieces of the glacier itself that had broken apart, but regardless of how they had gotten there, Sarah used the natural barriers for cover when the rain of lead became as thick as the falling snow.

Ice collected in her lungs, and she could feel her breaths shorten with every step forward. The pistol in her hand turned into an awkward chunk of ice the longer she held it, affecting her aim. A wake of .45 shell casings sat nestled in the snow behind her, and it didn’t take long before the shiny pieces of copper were buried under the endless barrage of white.

Sarah ejected the empty magazine and slammed the gun down on the spare magazine around her belt, and the top rack slid forward, pushing the first round into the chamber. She knew she was getting closer to the Russians’ center as she saw the edges of the erected tents swaying in the storm. She planted the targeting device in the snow, aiming it straight at the tent, and radioed the military. “Okay! I have contact with the beachhead!”

The radio scrambled and echoed on the other end. “Negative. We still do not have a good lock. I repeat, we do not have good lock on target.”

Bullets peppered the snow to her left, forcing her behind the cover of an ice pack. “Fifty feet, my ass.” Her numb fingers fumbled over her belt as she reached for a grenade but suddenly stopped as she heard the loud crunching of boots in snow. She reached for her Colt, but the moment she had her hand on the pistol’s grip, a Russian soldier crashed into her, sending the two of them rolling into the thick blankets of hardened powder.

The Russian shoved Sarah’s face into the ground, suffocating her. She flailed her arms, trying to grab hold of the arm pinning her down. The icy snow felt like glass grinding into her face. She kept reaching her hand out blindly until she felt the side of a neck then squeezed, feeling the warm burst of blood on her skin. The grip on the back of her head lightened, and she lifted her head from the snow, taking huge gulps of air.

Though she was blinded from the snow still glued to her face, her training instincts kicked in, and her hands found the pistols at her sides. More boots crunched in the snow around the corner of the ice pack and, with her face still stinging red from the ice burn, she killed two more soldiers, discoloring the blanket of white around her with scarlet splashes.

Sarah picked up the targeting device as clumps of bloodstained snow fell off her coat. The wind picked up, and the snowfall thickened. The radio cackled on the ground. “Sarah! You need to turn back now!”

She scooped up the radio and pressed the side button. “Hang on, Commander. Almost there.” The heat sensors in her boots had malfunctioned, leaving her to trudge through the thick snow unaided. The temperature plummeted with the gusts of wind and snow that accompanied it. Visibility had shortened to less than a foot. She knew her arms and legs were moving, but she couldn’t feel her body anymore.

The sound of the gunshots ended, and Sarah did her best to keep the same line of sight that she’d had before, trying to locate the tent without being able to see it. Another burst of wind and snow blinded her and also brought with it two Russians who smacked into her, sending the three of them into the snowdrifts.

One of the Russians looked up at her, his eyebrows and beard covered in the thick, white powder. “Narushitel'!”

“I really need to start using that Rosetta Stone language software I bought.” Before the Russian rose to his feet, she swung her leg around, spinning like a top on the slick, snowy surface, and landed it right across the Russian’s jaw, knocking him out cold.

The brief lull of gunfire ended as the Russian’s scream triggered retaliation from his comrades. Sarah reached for the laser and then, through the large sheets of white raining down on the Alaskan coast, she once again saw the outline of the Russian tents, only a few feet away.

Sarah reached over and grabbed the unconscious Russian’s wrist and then pulled his belt from around his waist. She pointed the targeting system at the tent, wrapped the man’s hand around the trigger, keeping it in place with the belt, and then sprinted away, radioing the troops on her run. “Target locked.”

“Affirmative, we have coordinates. Package inbound in ninety seconds.”

Sarah pumped her legs through the knee-high snow, her bones feeling as though they would snap in half. The wind and snow worked against her as she tried to put as much distance between her and the blast site as she could.

More gunfire sounded to her left. She pulled her pistol, aiming into the white haze, and squeezed the trigger, firing into the cold, the recoil of each shot sending another splintering pressure through her bones, widening the fault lines in her frozen body.

The first missile that touched down behind her instantly melted whatever ice was on her body as the heat and percussive wave blasted her face first into the snow. With her head still buried in the snow, she could feel the ground beneath her shake from the secondary blasts. She lifted her head just in time to see the pluming clouds of fire and smoke rise from the white earth, melting the sheets of frosty rain. The explosions went up and down the coastline. Sarah lay there, exhausted, as the fires quickly died out in the cold, and along with it the small amount of warmth they provided.