Firestorm
Firestorm
Alex Mara
Copyright © 2018 by Alex Mara
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover Design: Mayhem Cover Creations
Editor: Edits by Shavonne
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Afterword
Prologue
FIVE YEARS AGO
Darcy
I wanted to go back home. I wanted to return to Beacon.
"It's a temporary forgetting," Luther Ides explained from his stool. The sanitized white walls of the facility gleamed around his head, which gave me trouble focusing on his face. "It helps you detach a little bit from life aboveground while you familiarize yourself with the facility. Think of it like anti-anxiety meds."
I sat sideways on the operating table, as though by refusing to lift my legs up I wasn’t giving my consent. Yet.
"Everyone does it," I repeated.
"All fifty of the men and women I've recruited to this cause."
"And all their memories returned."
Ides nodded, his hands coming together with only the fingertips touching. An expression of patience. "All of them."
The truth was, he struck me as an incredibly impatient man. I hadn’t even been at the Ides Facility for a day, and I’d only just met him a half-hour ago. He’d waved me into the small examination room, his eyes only drifting over me, and now he was pressing me to take a drug that would "open my mind" to what I was about to see.
So far, I had seen little. I’d spent a sleepless night in Beacon, imagining what this facility might hold, what grand technology had been devised to combat the silvers, and I’d seen only lab rooms, petri dishes, beakers.
Better equipment than I’d had access to in Beacon—massively better—but nothing grand. Nothing remarkable that would make it all worth it. Leaving my home. Leaving my sister.
"I can see you're uncertain," Ides said.
I ducked my head. "I just want to know what's in the drug first."
He straightened on the stool. "Here's the thing, Darcy: before I started administering this little anti-anxiety med, people didn't know what to make of what I was doing down here. They were too rigid." His gray eyes shifted between mine. "But I sense you're more open-minded than that. Would you like a peek at what I'm creating?"
"Yes," I breathed.
He rose—even in his sixties, Luther Ides was an intimidatingly tall man—and stepped to the door. He opened it enough to speak to the guard outside, who nodded and disappeared into the hallway.
A minute later, a young, black-haired man stepped into the room clad only in a pair of black sleeping shorts. Tall, muscular, an impossibly perfect form, like a man out of a picture. And there was something in the way he moved, almost like a predator, that suggested fearsome power. Strength. Viciousness.
His green eyes fell on me and didn’t leave, and I averted my eyes to the bare wall almost by instinct.
"Both of you," Luther said, and when the door closed and my eyes flicked back to where the young man had been standing, there were two of him.
Two perfectly identical men.
"You..." I began. "You're—"
"Twins? In a manner of speaking," Ides said. "They're clones."
"Hello, Darcy West," said the first clone. I sensed that his gaze—cool, calm, level—hadn’t left me since he'd come into the room.
"Hello, Darcy West," said the other.
"She’s your new geneticist," Luther said. "You’ll call her Doctor."
I swallowed; my heart felt like a bird in a cage. This was unprecedented, ethically questionable, and dizzyingly advanced.
"You can’t,” I said.
"You have a sister with lupus, Doctor," Luther said. "Zara?"
I nodded, my eyes never leaving the two clones.
"You love her."
"Of course."
"I can save her. We can save her. This is how."
This was wrong. But thanks to Luther Ides, Zara’s face had appeared in my mind. I didn’t know yet what he was doing down here. There were so many questions I needed answered. Maybe I was jumping to the worst conclusions.
Maybe it wasn’t as wrong as I’d assumed. How quickly an objective truth became a subjective one when desperation entered the mix.
Those green eyes kept staring at me, and I knew I was breathing too fast. My hands had started to tingle. These were signs of hyperventilation. Overstimulation. Panic.
"Give me the meds," I whispered.
One
Friday, May 8, 2053
1:02 a.m.
Darcy
The ground bloomed above us, metal panels sliding away. The lift's top and sides slotted into place so that we rose to the surface on the tiny floor, our bodies still fitted together, faces close.
Late spring air enveloped me, and I took one long, reckless look at the sky. Here, in this place of death, a million grains of sand glowed above us. Pristine.
Blaze and I had escaped the facility. We were alive. Well, alive for now.
Above us, the moon hung full and ripe, illuminating the treeless, shrubless expanse. The silvers might not have seen us, but they would have scented me already—though not Blaze, who smelled like nothing to them.
My eyes fell on him, the golden edges of his large frame in the moonlight. A week ago I'd brought him into the world, called him "8024." He was the eight-thousandth, twenty-fourth iteration of the infiltrator model, the perfect assassin.
He had been engineered to survive in this place. The only things slowing him down were that he had only received part of his full training regimen...and me.
A regular human. Wounded, exhausted, and eminently killable.
But right now, his arms were wrapped so tight around me it felt like he would never let go. And I didn't want him to. “Tell me what you wanted to say,” he murmured, his mouth still set to my hair.
As he spoke, a cry sounded in the night; it came strangled, hungry. The hairs on my body lifted, my muscles tensing. “They’re here,” I whispered. As a response, another call sounded from somewhere in the long stretch of dark plain. That one couldn’t be more than a mile off.
I traced our location relative to Beacon in my mind. The emergency lift would have deposited us about ten miles outside the gates, facing north into the dead zone.
I spun, and in front of us the great behemoth city rose up in light, so bright I couldn’t look at it straight on. Even from this distance, it was that brilliant. “Run,” I said, pulling on Blaze's arm. “Run!”
We ran. Fear and exhaustion were so strong in me I was already winded as soon as we'd started, my clip slow. But Blaze stayed just a step or two ahead, gently increasing my pace.
Somewhere under all that morphine, I sensed my body objecting, the gunshot wound in my sh
oulder running hot beneath my makeshift tourniquet.
It felt simultaneously like a dream and acutely real. The gunshot, the escape, Blaze running with me through the emptiness of what used to be called the east coast of the United States.
The cry sounded closer, less than a mile; through the thunder in my ears I heard the familiar catch in the throat, and the awful, inhuman howling.
It was all real.
My tourniquet loosened with each step, and I felt myself growing faint, dizzy. The second painkiller was wearing off already.
We wouldn’t make it like this. I knew Blaze could get to the gates alone, but I would collapse before we got there. “Go,” I breathed, my words ragged. “I’m too slow.”
Blaze’s grip on my fingers tightened to an almost painful hold. “Never,” he said. The words came out smooth, certain, as though he wasn’t even winded, and he caught me up in his arms as we ran.
There was a reason I had nicknamed him Blaze that first day. I'd set him on a treadmill, and he'd run with inhuman speed, like he held nothing back.
But I'd been wrong; he had been holding back that first day.
This time he really moved. We pelted through the night, and with my ear right next to his chest, I could hear his body operating with machine precision, the great bellows of his lungs funneling air in and out.
Something caught in my throat, and the tiniest second wind surged through me. That was when I spotted the dock. “There,” I said, my arm jerking out to a far point at 10 o’clock.
Blaze understood. He cut left, bringing us toward the small building so fast I nearly lost my bearings.
I recognized this place from memory. We were approaching the housing for one of the great generators that powered Beacon. Long ago, these docks had been reinforced to protect the precious source of electricity within them. They were designed to withstand everything short of an atomic blast.
If we could get inside, the door would hold against the silvers. And inside, we might last until morning. Of course, getting inside without dying to the silvers or getting stuck on the door’s locking system seemed extremely unlikely.
It was a tiny thread, but my mind held to it with a ferociousness that surprised me. How precious this world seemed, and our short lives in it.
The first of the silvers reached us ten feet from the dock. I hadn’t known it until Blaze tossed me forward and I hit the metal siding with my good shoulder.
The impact was hard, painful. I gasped, my hands reaching out, searching for the entry panel. Under the shadow of the city the building was dark as pitch, and I could only press blind fingers across the sheer metal until I found what I was looking for.
In the darkness beyond, I heard the sounds of violence. That howling came again, along with feet or claws on the hard ground. Blaze didn’t speak, but I could hear his steps, the throw and press of bodies, a grunt.
My hand reached a hard stop on the door. There. I slid my fingers over the panel’s side, finding the latch. It clicked when I came to it, and the tiny door swung open. Another activation screen, just like the ones at the facility.
A brief moment of understanding: the old government had built this outpost, just as they'd built the Ides facility. Both were of the same make, which might mean I could access the dock with Luther Ides's stolen fingerprint.
In the darkness, another howl barreled in from the east. If this fingerprint didn’t work, we were done.
I pressed my finger hard to the screen. It pulsed red, considering whether I was really Luther Ides. “Come on, damn it,” I cried, banging the metal siding with my fist.
A tremendous growl followed, and a ripping sound. Blaze grunted, and their bodies tumbled to the ground. I heard the slick sound of a metal blade—Blaze's tanto—and then of man and creature fighting for their lives.
The screen pulsed away. Three seconds. Four seconds. I listened, my finger held to the screen, as the tanto sang again in the night and a garbled coughing followed, though I couldn't tell whether it was the creature or Blaze.
Five seconds. The screen went green, the door hissed open, and something sharp touched my shoulder. Claws.
I spun, jerking away. “Darcy,” Blaze said from behind me, his voice lower than usual. Those were his claws. In the moonlight, I saw he stood with one of his legs at an odd angle, the foot just touching the ground. “There's another coming.”
“Get inside,” I breathed, slipping under his arm. I hobbled the two of us through the doorway. Past the long rectangle of moonlight, I could see nothing. My hand went to the doorframe, slid along the edge, searching out the control that would seal it behind us.
I could hear the second silver approaching; its thudding sounded like low thunder. Beside me, Blaze’s body stood framed in the door, the tanto in one hand.
Near the top of the doorframe, I found it: the tiny trigger the size of the button on a shirt. “Back. Get back!” I yelled, and Blaze stepped back as the door’s emergency control powered it shut in a millisecond.
This prompted a long howl on the other side, and just a second later, claws raking down the reinforced wall between us and it.
Above us, the dock’s single overhead light powered on and the windowless room shone with spotless metal. At the center, a generator as large as me hummed like a toneless, comforting song.
And then Blaze dropped his tanto with a clang. A second later, he collapsed to the floor.
4:58 a.m.
Blaze
We weren’t safe here.
I woke to the sound of scrabbling, of pacing. I sat up in the shed and found Darcy asleep, her body curled tight to my form.
She breathed slow and steady. Her shoulder was still fitted with the tourniquet, but she wore it more like a brace now. When I leaned close, I scented that the gunshot wound wasn't exposed anymore.
At some point after I'd collapsed, she had treated herself—and me.
An aching, sharp pain shot up my leg when I moved it. My left thigh was wrapped in her white lab coat, which now bloomed with a spot of my blood.
All at once, I remembered the fight: a creature had chased us through the dark, and I'd thrown Darcy toward the building. When I turned, standing between it and her, the creature had come upon me like a force of nature, the two of us hitting the ground together.
It didn't want me. It had struggled to get past me with its claws, scrabbling over the ground and my body to get to her.
Now I stared down at my clothing, found the arms and chest of my stolen Gale's uniform ripped by clawmarks. Beneath, the wounds had already scabbed, and my body had begun the quick-healing process.
The marks weren't as deep as they could have been; the Gale uniform had saved me with its sturdiness. And my resilient engineering had taken care of the rest.
What had really saved us was the tanto. I lowered my hand down to my boot, found the blade tucked into the ankle of my left one. Darcy must have set it there while I was unconscious.
When I slid it out, the tanto came red with blood. I lifted it to my nose. Putrescent, animal. Not human blood.
These were the creatures I had been designed to kill. Quadrupeds with claws like knives, their bodies covered in fur.
I cleaned the blade on my pants, returned it to my boot. Beside us, a massive horizontal cylinder hummed with electricity, filling up nearly the entire building. There wasn't much else to this place: a rectangular light built into the flat ceiling, four metal walls, and a hard, cold floor.
Just like home.
We had enough room to walk around the edges of the cylinder, which was what I did. The wound I'd taken from the creature had already healed enough that I only limped with bearable pain. And the more I walked, the less it hurt.
My knuckles sounded on the walls. They were at least a foot thick, heavily reinforced; I suspected this place was designed to be impenetrable. And as my eyes fell on the cylinder, listened to its humming, I knew this thing before me was precious.
I set my hand to it, felt the vibr
ations. Thick black cables jutted from each end, looped around and descended through a perfectly cut gap in the floor. This was a generator, and it carried electricity.
After what I'd seen of Beacon last night—the whole place white with light like a massive star—electricity must be as precious as water to those living aboveground.
I dropped to my haunches, touching the spot where the cables disappeared into the floor. I couldn't slide them in or out or get any grip on the metal edges of the floor—the metal had been too perfectly cut—but I knew those cables went somewhere.
They went underground.
I stood, pacing around the generator, listening. My eyes searched the floor.
The panel became obvious as soon as I stepped on it, my foot echoing differently on that particular spot. I knelt, tracing my fingertips over the metal. The opening wasn't obvious to the eye, but I quickly found threadlike lines of the trapdoor opening, large enough for a man even bigger than me to pass through.
I set my ear to the floor. A low, distant humming—separate from the generator beside me, and different than anything I'd heard in the facility—came back to me.
This was our way out.
I returned to Darcy's side, pressed aside a stray tress of blonde hair from her cheek. She hadn't even stirred when I got up. She slept curled so far into herself she could have been anywhere. The sleep of the dead.
She needed rest more than I did, and I would wait as long as I could to wake her.
But we needed to move soon. I could hear them now—better than before, almost as though something in my ears had been unstoppered now that I'd fought one. They never ceased their pacing outside, and there were more of them than before.