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“I just couldn’t do it anymore,” he says. “The missions, the fighting. Why? My wife was dead, killed by the very people I’d dedicated my life to taking out. My job was to remove threats to the American people, and I couldn’t even keep my own wife alive.” He leans closer. “That’s when I left the military. I’d given about a decade of my life to my country. It was time to move on. I moved to Santee, California. My parents wanted me to come back home to the farm… but I wasn’t ready for that.” He swallows. “I was an idiot. I was destroyed, heartbroken. Broken by war. I’d see too much, way too much.” He looks into my eyes. “And then came the invasion, the EMP… and you.”
“I had no idea,” I tell him. “I just… I never knew.”
“How could you? I’m good at keeping secrets. I was trained to be a weapon.” He has a profound look of regret on his face. “When you came along, I fell in love all over again. But this time, we were both in a warzone. My chances of protecting you from Omega… from everything the world had become, were so much slimmer. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing you, Cassie. I was afraid that if I said I loved you, I’d jinx it all. Ruin everything. It had happened before… and because you’re a soldier, well… it could happen again. Chances are, it would happen. Soldiers die. Every day.”
I place my hands on his cheeks.
“But I’m not dead yet,” I say.
“No, you’re not.” A single tear sparkles in the corner of his eye, slipping down the side of his face. “I’m sorry, Cassie. I should have told you long ago. I’m an imperfect man with an imperfect past. But as long as you’re alive, I’ll do my best to keep you safe.”
I shake my head.
“No,” I say. “We’ll keep each other safe.”
I slowly kiss him. It is a short kiss, but a meaningful one. Full of promise and love and new hope. “We will survive this,” I say. “Together.”
He smiles his beautiful smile, and for a brief moment, all is right with the world.
“Commander?”
Chris and I both turn at the same time. Uriah is standing there. He is dressed in black. Like me, camouflage paint is smudged on his face.
“Yes?” I say.
Chris raises his eyebrows.
“Omega is here,” Uriah says. “Get ready.”
There is always a calm before the storm. I lie prone in the brush, my rifle in my shoulder, my cheek on the stock. I am comfortable, I am prepared. I am strangely at peace. Chris is beside me, his position the same.
We are a team again. A single unit.
We’ve got six teams here in the woods with us. All of them are members of the Freedom Fighters. I miss having Alexander Ramos and Derek in the fight with us, but we have to work with what we’ve got.
I see Omega approaching. They are coming up the steep incline, cautiously moving along. They are well armed. None of them are talking. They are expecting us to attack them at some point, but they ca
We are hidden, invisible. We are guerrilla warfighters and the element of surprise is our best weapon. I study the enemy. As always, Omega is a varietal mix of ethnicities. German, Russian, Middle Eastern and Chinese. Some of them I can’t put my finger on. It brings on the same old question: Where does Omega really come from?
Focus, steady, I tell myself. Get ready, girl.
They come closer. I can feel my blood rushing through every inch of my body. I swear that I can hear Chris’s heartbeat next to mine. I barely move my head, enough to see Uriah on the ground with his team about two hundred feet to my right. Vera has her team two hundred feet to my left. Sophia and Andrew’s teams are further ahead. We form a curved lineup, a crescent moon. We are pulling the enemy in, trapping them inside a corral made of soldiers and bullets.
Ten, twenty, fifty, eighty…
I count under my breath. There are at least two hundred Omega troops here. I wrinkle my brow, a twinge of worry in the back of my mind. Harry had at least five hundred troops in the dunes. Where are the other three hundred? Probably spread out around the city.
I shake myself.
Five hundred troops is not really enough to inflict damage when you’ve got militia warfighters and United States military forces guarding a heavily fortified city. The warships on the coastline… they’re not firing any more cruise missiles because they fear retaliation from the Alliance.
But Omega has always fought dirty. Why would they follow the rules?
A thought strikes me.
“Oh, my God…” I whisper. “Chris…”
He looks at me. He makes a sign to remain silent.
I have gone completely pale. Blanched like a sheet.
Where’s Ma
I am bursting, dying to tell Chris what is going on inside my head. This is important, this is life or death. If I’m right, this could be the difference between Monterey falling into enemy hands or us achieving a major victory against Omega.
The front line of the Omega troops are close enough to hear their breathing.
Chris gives the signal by firing the first shot, hitting a soldier in the head. He jerks backward. There is a momentary, split-second where the enemy is frozen. And then everything is chaos.
We are at war once more.
I bring my rifle back into my shoulder, taking a shot. My first bullet hits my target, but I am off by a couple of inches, nevertheless.
“Hang in there,” I tell myself aloud.
The smattering of gunfire in the quiet of the forest turns into a barrage of white noise, of shattering limbs and desperate, guttural pleas for mercy. Sprays of blood fill the air. I move in formation with the rest of my units. Dropping to one knee to shoot, fire and return fire. Then I sprint to the next area of cover, repeat the action, and do it all over again. There is no break in the fight. It is one massive blur of instinctive movement. Of action and reaction. I make sure that I am in the former category.
I want Omega to react to me.
Chris and I stay together. I am always right behind his shoulder as we move from position to position. Our lines move in a circle around the Omega forces. We surround them from all sides, boxing them into our circle of fire.
It is a technique that we once used when we were fighting Omega in the hills of Squaw Valley and the smaller Central Valley farm towns like Sanger and Dinuba. We are so well camouflaged that Omega can barely see us as we move from point to point. It must seem as if they’re being attacked by ghosts.
If they only knew how much they outnumber us.
An Omega soldier manages to worm his way to the front of the enemy line and charge forward, evading gunfire for a few moments. He is very young — almost childlike in his appearance. I am kneeling behind the trunk of a tree, reloading my weapon. I see him coming. He is holding his gun carelessly, a wild look in his eyes. I know that look. It is the expression of someone who knows they are about to lose a fight.
He sees me behind the tree. I am the first person to make eye contact with him. I snap my rifle into my shoulder but he is faster than me. He is crazed with terror and the knowledge that he is about to die.
That is the difference between us: he doesn’t care.
He squeezes the trigger on his automatic weapon. A sputtering of gunfire hits the tree right above my head, tearing pieces of bark off the trunk, tossing splinters into the air like confetti.
I duck down, flinching. I fire off a couple of shots, hitting him twice in the shoulder. He jerks backward and rolls into the brush. He crawls on his stomach. His weapon is out of reach, his teeth are gritted in pain. Blood seeps from the sides of his mouth. I drop to my hands and knees and grab the butt of his weapon, bringing it to my feet, away from his grip.