Nicholas Smith - Extinction Age

“Wait up!” said another voice from behind them.

Ellis hurried down the corridor, his jet-black hair slicked back and glistening under the LEDs. “You weren’t going to leave without me, were you?”

Kate shook her head. “No, but we need to hurry.”

“Let’s go,” the soldier said. He opened the door with one hand and raised his rifle with the other, sliding the muzzle into moonlight. “Stay close,” he ordered.

“I thought the island was cleared,” Kate said, gripping the girls’ hands a bit tighter.

“It was, ma’am, but Major Smith isn’t taking any chances.”

Silhouetted guards manned a heavy caliber machine gun, and an industrial spotlight was set up behind a wall of sandbags in the center of the hexagon-shaped base. The beam swept across the path and then arched over the horizon, illuminating plumes of smoke rising from the smoldering wreckage of the Chinook helicopter on the tarmac. Kate stared at the flayed metal carcass as they walked, wondering exactly how the Variants it had been carrying had escaped. She’d been against bringing live test subjects to the island, but she took no pleasure in being proved right.

For weeks Plum Island had been spared from the horrors surging across the globe. Now the base looked like a warzone. Overhead, two blinking red dots worked across the darkness, and Kate heard the distant thump of helicopter blades.

Static broke from the radio on the vest of their soldier escort. “Echo 2 and 3 incoming. All medical crews report to tarmac,” said a female operator.

The guard continued on as if he hadn’t heard the transmission at all, but Kate paused. She crouched in front of the girls and pointed at the sky.

“You ready to see your dad?” she asked.

“Is Daddy in one of those?” Jenny said, her voice hardly a whisper.

“Yup, he’s coming home.”

“Is Reed coming home, too?” Tasha asked.

Kate fought the growing dread rising inside of her and said, “Not yet, honey. Not yet.”

General Richard Kennor hustled through an underground tunnel on his way to Central Command. The sun wouldn’t rise for hours, but most of his staff was already awake. Judging by their exhausted looks, some of them hadn’t slept at all. He fell into the same category, and it showed. His movements were sluggish and his eyes were swollen with fatigue. The caffeine had worn off hours ago, and he was operating on pure adrenaline. Sleep during wartime was like the first months of having a child: it came in short intervals, if at all.

An entourage trailed the four-star general as he continued down the crowded hallway. The bunker, buried deep beneath Offutt Air Force Base, was the same location former President George W. Bush had been taken after the September 11 attacks. Now it was the temporary home of more than two hundred people from every corner of the nation, ranging from congressmen to Navy Seals. There was even an anchor from CNN who had managed to sneak in with a senator’s political staff. When the evacuations began weeks ago, chaos and pure luck had ensured that these few had lived.

Kennor watched the flow of human traffic as he walked. In most cases these were important people—people the government had believed should survive an apocalyptic event. Kennor, however, could have done without two-thirds of them. He needed military personnel, men and women who knew how to fight a war. Fortunately, President Mitchell had given him a blank check to wage the war against the Variants as soon as he had been sworn into office.

He didn’t like the new POTUS, and not just because of his political affiliation. The former President pro tempore of the Senate was weak. That was the biggest flaw in a leader, to Kennor’s mind. The chaotic first few weeks of the outbreak had proven Mitchell’s time in congress hadn’t qualified him to lead a country, especially during a time of war. His only redeeming quality was the fact he stayed inside his bunker at Cheyenne Mountain and kept his mouth shut while Kennor handled the heavy lifting.

“Sir,” came a voice that distracted Kennor from his thoughts.

A pair of guards opened the double doors to the command center, and Kennor hurried inside. He took the first left into a small conference room. His personal staff—his three closest confidantes—were already inside. They rose from their seats around the war table and stood at attention as he entered. Their grave looks served as a powerful reminder that the human race was losing the war. Operation Liberty had failed on a massive level.

“At ease,” Kennor said as he took a seat. Most of them had been with him the better part of a decade fighting the war on terror. To his left was Colonel Harris, a man with slicked-back white hair and a mustache to match. Across the table sat Marsha Kramer, a middle-aged lieutenant colonel with crimson hair and a pair of dimples that rarely got any use. Kennor’s oldest friend, General George Johnson, was on the right, his bald head shining under the bank of lights overhead.

His hand shook as he reached for the folder marked Confidential . Breaking the seal, he pulled out a briefing and took a moment to scan his staff.

“Let’s get started. Harris,” Kennor said.

The colonel stood and stiffened. “In front of you, General, is the initial report from Operation Liberty. We suffered heavy losses in every major city. The Variants overran almost every single FOB established. New York is lost. So is Chicago. Minneapolis. St. Louis. Nashville. Atlanta. It’s a mess, sir.”

Kennor shook his head. He’d been caught with his pants down. Thousands of soldiers from every branch of the military were dead because he had ignored the advice of Lieutenant Colonel Jensen and Dr. Kate Lovato. The cities he had so desperately wanted to protect were now in ruins because he’d made the wrong call.

“The good news is that the Air Force pounded the Variants hard with firebombs. The troops drew them out of their holes, and the flyboys turned them to ash. Preliminary reports indicate we killed a significant number.”

“Do we have any idea how many are left?”

“Several recon teams have been deployed, and satellite imagery is being monitored as we speak,” Harris said.

“I want numbers,” Kennor snapped. “ Solid numbers.”

“Yes, sir,” Harris said and made a note on his pad.

“How about survivors? Do we know how many people are left out there?” Kramer asked.

Harris’s slight hesitation was all Kennor needed to know it wasn’t good.

“I’m afraid we don’t have solid numbers there either,” Harris said.

“Then give me some soft numbers,” Kennor replied.

Harris raised a brow and in a matter-of-fact tone said, “Extinction, sir. We’re looking at the near annihilation of the human race if we don’t stop the Variants in the next month.”

“You mean to tell me the Variants have killed the majority of the world’s population in less than a month?” Kennor said.

“That’s precisely what he’s saying,” Kramer said. “With all due respect, sir, those things aren’t mindless zombies. We have underestimated them every step of the way. If we are going to win this war, we need to change our tactics.”

Kennor shook his head. “NYC proves these things can be killed. Draw them out and bomb them to kingdom come.”

“Draw them out with what, sir? More Marines?” Kramer said. There was anger in her challenge. Under normal circumstances, he’d have called her out for insubordination, but things had changed.

As the Pit Bull of the American Military—a nickname he’d always hated—he had overseen countless missions during the war on terror. The Variants had proved much harder to kill. Now the jihadists were fighting the same enemy he was, and the irony was hard to swallow. The world had changed practically overnight. And like so many times before, circumstance had turned enemies into allies.