Cold blooded.
Clinical.
He motions with his super focused and not at all bloodshot eyes out the window. He looks up at the night sky and then back at me.
His smart phone is on. GPS signal. It is controlling the drone. Maybe it’s controlling multiple drones. A swarm.
The penny drops and I say, “Oh.”
And I take another swig of whiskey as a reflex. And maybe I think it will help. My hands are shaking. “How?” I ask. “You guys have attack drones inside US airspace? Civilian air space?”
He looked at the smart phone. “Yes. Of course.”
“You’ve got swarms operating inside American airspace? You’re controlling a swarm?”
“That’s classified.”
My mind struggles to keep up. I know this is bad. “But you’ve had problems. Swarms have been compromised. The cyber attacks…”
“Abroad, yes. But not here. Not on our home turf.”
“What’s the difference? There is no difference.”
“We will contain this threat. We can’t have you...”
“What? You can’t have me what? Telling people the truth? Telling people to get the fuck out of major cities?”
“We can’t have you causing a panic. The goal of terrorism is not to kill, it’s to cause terror. Fear.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing. The threat is real. They are gearing up for an attack. Here. On American soil. You need to warn everyone. You need to get ready. The attacks in Africa and Asia and the Middle East; they’re just practice. It’s a dress rehearsal.”
He shakes his head because he doesn’t believe me or he doesn’t want to believe me.
“They are going to use our own weapons against us,” I say.
“No one has the technical capabilities. It is simply not possible.”
The Spymaster is in denial and I take another drink.
And the room spins.
I look at the bottle. I haven’t drunk as much as I thought I had.
The room spins.
“Get some sleep,” he says.
And I feel sleepy. I can’t focus my vision. The Bellagio fountain erupts. But the noise is distant. The Spymaster sits there at the bedside table and he is as relaxed as a man in his position could be. He knows I’m not a threat.
I am not a threat.
I look at the bottle of whiskey in my hand. I haven’t drunk as much as I thought. The bottle was delivered. Room service. Was the cap sealed? I can’t remember. For the life of me, I can’t remember.
I drop the bottle.
The eighteen year old scotch whiskey spills onto the carpet but I don’t care.
I look at the Spymaster.
He nods. “Yes. You have been drugged.”
He leans forward and he speaks to me and there is fear in his voice. “Do you really think the drones will make it here?”
And he really wants to know.
The room is getting dark. My world, my life is getting dark and I whisper, “We all deserve to die. The drones are coming. The war is coming. And it’s all our fault.”
CHAPTER 9
I wake up in the passenger seat of a pickup truck. My pickup truck.
It’s the middle of the night. And I am in the middle of nowhere, Nevada. I know I am in the middle of nowhere because the night sky is unbelievably bright. It’s lit up with a billion stars and I can see the spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy and it looks like someone has ripped open the night. It looks like a massive tear across the sky.
The engine is on. It’s in neutral. The radio is on.
The voices are muffled. It’s not music. It’s a news report. The voices are frantic. Full of fear and panic.
The Spymaster is nowhere to be seen.
Did he drive me all the way out here?
Why?
Why hasn’t he killed me?
I thought that’s what he was going to do. I thought I knew too much. I thought he didn’t want me causing a panic.
I feel around in my pocket for my phone. My hand grazes the diamond ring.
I grab my phone. I need to call someone. Get the word out.
I call Melanie.
It rings. And rings. No answer.
I try again. Still no answer.
I call my brother.
It rings. I hear a noise. A click.
I’m not sure what the noise was. I think I can hear breathing, but I’m not sure.
“John?”
No answer.
Silence. Static.
“John? Are you there? Listen, you need to get out of the city. Get as far away from New York as possible. Do you hear me? I think something bad is about to happen. I’m not sure what. I…”
I can barely string a sentence together. I’m still doped up on whatever the Spymaster drugged me with. It’s a struggle to keep my eyes open, a struggle to talk.
The voices on the radio are still frantic. And still fuzzy and distant.
“John, are you there?”
The call cuts out.
For a second the voices on the radio become clearer. They are saying, “It has been confirmed. Multiple explosions across multiple targets. Downtown Los Angeles. LAX airport. The Hawaiian island of Oahu. And several oil drills in the gulf. Many believe this is the first strike of the drone war on American soil. Many believe this is the beginning of a world war.”
The news hits me in the chest.
Melanie was right. It was inevitable.
The news continues to give the details of the attacks.
But I already know the details because they have already happened all over the world.
The bombings happened at the same time. Within seconds of each other.
They were coordinated and executed to perfection. They were precise and accurate. Laser guided accurate.
No one knows who is responsible.
No one is claiming responsibility.
And this is perhaps the scariest thing, the most terrifying thing. The fact that no one knows who is responsible. You can’t fight a war against an enemy that doesn’t exist.
I try and call Melanie again. I need to know that she’s safe, that she’s alive. I need to hear her voice.
The phone rings.
Someone answers but they don’t speak.
“Melanie?”
The call cuts out.
I look at the bars of reception. I have a full five bars.
Then four.
Then three.
Two.
One.
The screen of my phone freezes and then distorts and there’s a flash of static and then it goes dark.
The radio cuts in and out. The engine dies.
I hear a noise. A crack. It could be thunder. But it’s not. It’s a rocket. My drugged effected brain knows it’s too late. But my body moves all by itself.
I reach for the door handle. I open the door. I dive out of my pickup truck and I try and bury myself in the desert but it’s no use. I know that the drone, most likely a Predator drone, has targeted the truck. Not me. That’s why they left the engine on. Left it idling.
They wanted the engine to be nice and hot. Easier to see. Easier to target.
My brain clicks through these calculations, these thoughts, this cold blooded and methodical and clinical plan of my death. I think about all of this in an instant.
Just enough time for me to jump out of my car and hit the desert ground as the AGM Hellfire missile hits the truck.
The explosion causes me to black out and when I regain consciousness there is smoke everywhere and blood everywhere and my legs have disappeared.
I have been cut in half.
The smoke clears and somewhere high above the Nevada desert is a Predator drone.
They are watching.
They are watching in heat vision. Infra red.
They are watching the blood pour out of my legs. They are watching the blood cool and turn the same color as the ground.
They are watching my body cool
. From white hot, to cold gray.
They are watching me bleed out and die.
And I wonder if they can tell. I wonder if they know I was desperate and broken. Afraid. Could they see this? Could they see everything like a god?
I wonder if they know there is a war coming. A drone war. I wonder if they know that it’s all our fault.
Did you enjoy this short story? If so, check out this other cool stuff…
The Secret Apocalypse
Book 1 in The Secret Apocalypse series
EXTINCTION LEVEL
Book 2 in The Secret Apocalypse series
Where The Dead Men Lie
Book 3 in The Secret Apocalypse series
Torn Apart
Book 4 in The Secret Apocalypse series
Salvation
Book 5 in The Secret Apocalypse series
A World on Fire
Book 6 in The Secret Apocalypse series
Land of Dust and Bones
Book 7 in The Secret Apocalypse series
The Lost Journal
(A Secret Apocalypse Story)
The Lost Journal Part 2
Coming Soon
Secret Apocalypse book 8
Also by J. L. / James Harden
Wasteland Wonderland
Ninja Vs Samurai
For more info visit jamesharden.blogspot.au
Or Tweet me @james.harden07 or whatever.
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The following is an excerpt from THE SECRET APOCALYPSE
The Beginning of The End
I’m sitting in the penthouse suite of a hotel in Los Angeles with a TV camera pointed at my face. Sitting next to me is a journalist from a well known news program, although I can’t remember which news program they said. Was it Fox News or something on CNN? Maybe it was 60 minutes? For the life of me I can’t remember. After everything I’ve been through, little details like which global TV network I’m appearing on are starting to slip my mind.
The journalist also has a camera pointed at his face but I don’t think the cameras are on yet. At least I hope they’re not on yet. I look like crap. The makeup department is going to have their work cut out for them when they get here. I’ve just been through hell and as a result I look like hell. What’s that saying again? A face for radio?
The room is full of people working frantically to get everything ready in time. There’s the camera man and a sound guy. There’s a guy holding up a big white reflective thing and an important looking woman who could be a producer or something of that nature.
The important looking woman walks over to me with a clipboard in hand and asks me if I’m feeling all right. “Are you feeling all right?” She checks her clipboard. “Have you taken your medication?”
I haven’t been able to sleep since I made it back. They gave me some pills to help with the insomnia but they’re not working. I don’t want to tell her this. So I nod my head and smile.
The producer kneels down in front of me. “Rebecca, we did a brief background check on you and we just need you to verify some of our facts.”
I nod my head again. They need to put a human face to all of this and at the moment I’m the only human face they’ve got.
She runs a French manicured finger nail down the clip board and asks me a whole bunch of boring stuff like how I grew up in Brooklyn and then moved to Sydney. How I’m only sixteen years old and how I don’t even have a driver’s license yet.
“Is that even important?” I ask about the driver’s license.
“We can use it to highlight how young you are.”
“Oh.”
Then she asks about the stuff I don’t want people to know about. She asks me about my father. “OK, according to this, your father was killed in action while serving in Afghanistan when you were thirteen?”
“No.”
“No?”
“They never confirmed he had been killed,” I say. “They never found his body.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that our records indicate...”
“He’s MIA.”
She makes a note on her clipboard. “Missing in action. Got it. I’m sorry, to push these issues, Rebecca. But we need to be sure of everything. If at any stage you feel uncomfortable during the interview we can stop and take a break. The interview will be a delayed telecast of about thirty minutes so we’ve got plenty of time.”
“You’re not going to ask me about all of that are you?”
“No. Not all of it. We just need to use some of that background information to introduce you to the public. Once they know your story, they’ll have a better understanding of everything that’s going on. You have a big responsibility. You’re the only survivor. People have a right to know what happened down there. And since the military aren’t talking, we’re all counting on you.”
It’s weird how they keep saying I’m the only survivor, like the others are already dead. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around just how many people died. I think I’m still in denial.
The producer introduces me to the journalist. “Rebecca, this is Steve Munroe. He’s one of our most senior reporters here.”
His face looks familiar but I was never really one for watching hardcore news programs.
He extends his hand to shake mine. “Hi, Rebecca. I just want to say I admire your courage and determination. You’re a brave girl for doing this.”
I shake his hand.
The producer’s phone rings and she walks away to answer it.
“Now Rebecca,” says Steve, the journalist. “Before we start recording, I just want to run you through some of the questions I’ll be asking you.”
“OK.”
“If there’s anything you don’t want to talk about you just let me know.”
“Will do.”
He tells me people will want to know four things. “So basically, with a big story like this, people always want to know four things. They want to know the who, the what, the why and the how.”
I nod my head.
“The who is easy. That’s you. You are the sole survivor. People will want to know all about you. They’ll want to know what makes you special, what makes you tick. Once people know who you are, they’ll want to know what happened down there and why it happened. But they won’t want to hear it from just anyone; they’ll want to hear it from you, straight from your mouth, straight from the source.”
I wonder if anyone will even believe me when I tell them what is happening down there.
“But a big part of this interview will deal with the how of it. How did you do it? How did you survive when so many people didn’t make it? When so many people died?”
That’s a good question. I’ve been trying to figure this one out ever since I made it back. But I can’t. All I can think about are the people who matter most to me. Forget about the millions of other people. I know it sounds selfish but that’s the way it is. I can’t stop thinking about my mother. I can’t stop thinking about my friends. Maria and Kenji. Jack and Kim. We survived so much. We survived together. Yet somehow I’m the only one who made it out. Somehow, I’m the only one giving this interview.
“I mean, the entire Australian population is gone,” says Steve. “Over twenty million people wiped out in a matter of weeks. People will want to know, people will need to know how you escaped, how you stayed alive.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And the more I think about it, the more I realize my friends were the reason I survived. If I didn’t have them, I wouldn’t be here. No freakin way.
The producer walks back over to us as she hangs up her phone. “Rebecca sweetie, just answer the questions like no one else is in the room, OK? Take all the time you need. I understand if everything might be a little hazy.”
I tell her I’ll try real hard to remember even though everything is crystal clear, ultra real, like I’m watching my memories
on a high definition, flat screen television.
The producer looks at her watch. “We haven’t got long. We’re going live in one hour. Steve, can I talk to you in private for a second?”
“Live?” I ask.
“Yeah. There’s been a slight change of plan.”
The two of them exchange a look and I get the feeling that something is wrong.
“Please excuse me for just one minute,” says the journalist. “Oh, and while I’m gone try and think about the turning point for you. The moment when you realized something bad was about to happen.”
They both walk off to the master bedroom. They start talking. The producer then turns around and closes the door behind her.
Great. This is going to be worse than I thought. I’m starting to regret my decision to give this interview. I know people have a right to hear the truth but do they really need to hear it from me? I was never a good public speaker, never good at verbalizing what I wanted to say.
Maybe I should just run away. No one is really paying attention. Not the sound guy, not even the camera man. I could totally do it. I could walk out of the room, take the elevator down to the lobby, hail a taxi. Seems like a good option, an easier option. But then I see Steve left his pen and notepad on his chair. The producer mentioned something about everyone counting on me to find out what happened especially since the military aren’t answering questions. The media have called it ‘The Secret Apocalypse’, a full on extinction level event that was covered up and kept hidden from the world. It’s hard to believe in this age of information no one really knows what’s going on.
It’s hard to believe no one knows the truth. No one but me.
I remind myself that I do have a duty of sorts. Not just to answer everyone’s questions, but to my friends, to let people know what they did, how awesome and heroic they were right to the very end. So I pick up the pen and the notepad and head for the bathroom. I lock the door and sit down on the cool marble floor.
People need the truth and this is the best way. I used to write a lot, especially after my father disappeared. So I force myself to concentrate. It takes a few minutes but then my brain kicks into gear and starts working overtime. The pen begins to move almost of its own accord. My writing is messy but legible. Everything is being replayed in my mind’s eye at high speed. Important events are being freeze framed, rewound, watched over and over. I scribble down the main points that people need to know about.