“Makara is,” Ashton said pointedly. “I will show her everything there is to know.”
Makara’s eyes widened. It was the first time I’d seen them light up in weeks. “I could learn that.”
Samuel smiled. “I thought you might like that. Once we get situated, there are still a few things we need to take care of. Number one on our list is stopping the war between the Empire and Raider Bluff. This will mean contacting both Char and Augustus. We will need both if we are to take the fight to Ragnarok. We also need to locate Bunkers 76 and 88. After soldiers, we want their weapons and supplies. And it would be good to find out if they are still around.”
“Alright,” I said, “stop a war and find a couple Bunkers. Should be easy.”
“We should also go to L.A. and Vegas,” Samuel said. “It’s a long shot, but they are the most populous cities in America at the moment. If we can get any of the gangs interested, they could join us in the attack.”
“They’ll be too busy being at each other’s throats for that,” Anna said.
“We have to try,” Samuel said. “I’m sure they are worried about the Blights as well. Who wouldn’t be? When we offer a plan that could destroy the Blights, they’ll listen.”
“How will we get everyone to the Crater?” I asked.
“
“So we will board both ships with a strike team of the very best,” Samuel said. “Meanwhile, the vast majority of the army will enter the Great Blight from the southwest, near where we entered it. Hopefully, that move will draw the attention of the turners and the Voice that commands them. With luck, that will leave the Crater undefended. That’s when we drop in, find the hub that controls the Voice, and kill it.”
“It does,” Ashton said. “Something is behind the Voice. If that can be destroyed, the entire invasion will be directionless. It is something we must do before the second wave comes.”
“Even if we manage all that,” I said, “even
Ashton answered. “No one knows what that will be like. We can’t predict what their numbers will be, or what fighting capacity they will have. I will communicate with you all from Skyhome while you’re on board the
“Seriously, you’re giving us your ship?” Anna asked.
“I wouldn’t unless the matter called for it,” Ashton said.
“How long will I need to be trained to fly it?” Makara asked.
“There’s not much to it,” Ashton said. “I learned the controls within a month. In the meantime, Samuel, your team can continue to recover here while Makara trains.”
“So I guess a month from now, we’ll be starting,” I said.
We had our work cut out for us. We would know, very soon, which of us would be extinct: us, or
Xenofall was coming.
About the Author
Kyle West is a science fiction author living in Oklahoma City. He is currently working on
Contact
Two months later, and none of what I lived felt real. My dad would always be dead. Khloe would always be dead. Bunker 108, along with most every other Bunker, was offline and gone. The United States, along with the rest of the world’s governments, no longer existed except as an idea. In their wake were the new players — the Raiders, the gangs, and the empires fueled by slavery, bullets, and blood. In the end, they wouldn’t matter, either. After all, this world wasn’t ours anymore. This world belonged to
When we returned to Earth, it wouldn’t be just survival this time. Our mission was to save a planet doomed to die. We needed to take what we’d learned from the Black Files and utilize it. The people of the Old World believed global warming, war, or famine would be our undoing. They were wrong. The Xenos pulled the plug before we ever could — and we were madly trying to plug it back in.
The break from action was nice for the first two weeks, but I was starting to get bored. I filled the time by working out. Samuel was training me in hand-to-hand combat, and Anna was training me in the katana. However, there was only so much I could learn before heading back. I feared not being ready in time.
The coming mission was the only thing I could focus on. In a weird way, it was an escape. Maybe saving the world was the delusion that kept me going. The four of us were caught in it, each in our separate ways and for our separate reasons. It had become our focus, our obsession. Everything else was on hold until our mission reached its conclusion, whatever that conclusion happened to be.
Samuel said Ragnarok was only the beginning. I had come to realize what that beginning actually entailed. Everything would become twisted by the Blights, preparing the way for the Xenos. No one knew when they were coming, or what they were like. But we knew that they were advanced enough to have sent an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, and were probably capable of interstellar travel.
Why they didn’t come when we were so weak, no one knew. It was one thing to be grateful for. It gave us time to find a solution.
It was only a matter of time until everything was controlled by the xenovirus, and through the xenovirus, the Voice. Stopping it meant going after the Voice itself. Ashton and Samuel conferred for hour after hour, trying to hash out a plan that would succeed in destroying the Voice while keeping everyone alive. If Bunker One was any indication of what Ragnarok Crater would be like, we were in for the fight of our lives. Even with backup, the Voice wouldn’t go down easily.
It wasn’t as if Ragnarok Crater was a small thing. It was over a hundred miles wide. The Voice, or whatever controlled the Voice, was located somewhere in that huge area. We had to find a better way of locating its exact point of origin. Ashton said he was working on a solution to that problem.
