Pierce slid back as Martinez’s screams and ricocheted gunfire carried back through the hallway. He jumped to his feet and blasted off in the opposite direction.
Through a corridor of concrete, Pierce ran all out, not wasting a second to look back. His machine gun rattled in his hand like cheap jewelry. His breathing was hard to contain. The end of the corridor was approaching. Escape seemed possible. The faint glow of a distant room lingered from around a sharp corner. He exploded around the corner with a sense of victory.
Something struck him from the side with enormous impact. His legs buckled beneath him. His head slammed to the pavement, and his body collapsed on top of his rifle. Everything went dark.
Pierce lay across cold concrete. He was unconscious as the sounds of the emerging hostiles closed in on him.
CHAPTER 2
It was complete blackness — the kind of image one would see when eyes are sealed shut. The only sensory information was sound. The interior drone of a driving car overpowered the darkness as the muffled hum of passing intersection traffic buzzed through a cracked window outside. It sounded like a dream. It was distant and echoed.
A little girl spoke gently in the darkness. “Are you coming back?”
A woman’s emotional, guilty whimpers could be heard in the background. The weeping woman sniffled through the space, almost overtaking the little girl’s question.
“Mamma, where you going now?” the little girl’s voice continued, and it repeated this several more times.
The sounds of the car began to dissipate with the arrival of a new surroundings. The ghostly, faint ambience of twenties jazz music scratched from the copper horn of an old Edison phonograph machine. The faint echoes of laughter and chatter accompanied the music.
Where the hell are we? When the hell are we?
The darkness ended through the perspective of Stacy Hanna. She was an attractive, thirtysomething Caucasian. She was lying on her side. The aging concrete floor pillowed her face. She studied the setting with a disorienting scowl and sat up in a painful hurry. Everything was blurry. She blinked multiple times, and her ears felt muffled.
Where the hell am I? This wasn’t the office she last remembered. She had left Washington Dulles International Airport at 6:30 a.m. and flew to Las Vegas. From there, it was only another twenty minutes to the Groom Lake Base by private plane. She last remembered a thirty-minute briefing from a high-ranking colonel. He had spent most of the session staring at her breasts. Her memory seemed to escape her from there.
She narrowed her eyes as the brightness of the environment flooded her groggy face, and an image of a person began to form as her eyes adjusted out of the blur. She quickly pinned her back up against one of the walls to observe her surroundings and secure herself.
She glanced around. Her face slowly soured at the sight. The room was somewhere around eight hundred square feet and looked like some type of Cold War bunker. She couldn’t help feeling immediately trapped. There were no windows. A large metal door framed the wall across from her and was also hard to miss.
Her attention suddenly angled toward a young white man slouched over on the floor against an old filing cabinet. He was slowly gaining consciousness when their eyes locked. He was in his early thirties and was dressed in filthy mechanic’s coveralls. He shook off his slumber and looked away without concern. Despite his handsomeness, he certainly didn’t look friendly. He glanced around the room with a gruff, throaty moan and rubbed the grogginess from his unshaven face.
The clicking of heavy footsteps grabbed their attention. Another person was moving across the room. It was a large, imposing black man. He was about sixty years old, and he seemed to be on a mission. He held a red plastic credit card — shaped object and gave it a good once-over. He shoved it into his pocket, lumbered toward the metal door, and tugged the rusted old handle solidly. It was sealed tight. No one was getting in, and it seemed to comfort him. He looked across the room like an inspector and shook out a wristwatch from under the sleeve of his burgundy dress sweater. The time was three fifteen in the afternoon. It was anyone’s guess how long they had been inside this place. Russell looked the part of an office worker. He wore a neat necktie and dress shirt underneath the sweater. A pair of casual Dockers helped sell the image of a confident man on the verge of retirement.
The man quickly shuffled back and forth with a pondering scowl. His movements were distracting and hard to miss. Hanna watched him aggressively as he hovered close to her personal space. She couldn’t find the words to express her confusion. Maybe it would just take some time to wake up. Hopefully someone would have some answers to where they were.
A coughing spasm coming from across the room interrupted the solitude. Yet another person was inside this eight-hundred-square-foot bunker. It was an attractive black female in air force ABUs. The patch on her jacket’s collar indicated her rank. She was a first lieutenant. An embroidered name patch across her chest bared the last name of Sullivan.
The lieutenant woke up choking on her own spit. Her face seemed dull and sickly. It was as if the blood had drained from her face. She rolled her head to the floor and tried to catch her breath. She glanced up with embarrassment, slowly discovering she had an audience.
Everyone looked toward her as she cleared her throat and swallowed the phlegm back down. The young man pivoted away with annoyance. He took in a long sigh to showcase his agitation. Gail slowly settled herself and rolled back to the wall.
No one seemed familiar. Everyone seemed equally perplexed.
Hanna nodded to the woman, looking for some type of connection. There was none. Gail quickly angled away and withdrew back into her isolation. The woman’s disinterest surprised Hanna. Being the only other female, an alliance between them seemed logical. Yet the lieutenant offered nothing of the sort.
Hanna slowly glanced down. At the bend in her arm was a long strip of medical tape that sealed down a cotton ball. Oh my God! She quickly ripped off the tape to notice a small red dot on her arm. It was the marking of a needle. Who did this?
“What is this?” Hanna sighed with building anger.
The older man spoke from the side of his mouth. “Relax.”
The younger man smirked at the reply. He seemed to know something but remained silent. He slowly stood up and went toward the corner of the room, watching Hanna struggle to comprehend the situation.
“They’re moving stuff on base. We’re all right. We just have to be patient,” the older man continued, and he retrieved the gauze taped to his arm.
“Who did this?” Hanna replied.
The older man casually walked over to a weathered armchair tucked away in the corner and plopped down, putting the old chair in an even more compromising position. He leaned forward and rubbed his face with exhaustion. “Security police put us here. They’ll be back soon enough.”
“They don’t have any right to do this!” Hanna fired back, still stuck in the fact she had been given a shot.
“It’s messed up how they do you, but on base, they pretty much own you. They do it so you don’t see anything. It’s for national security. It happens all the time. Think of it as a good nap compliments of Uncle Sam,” the older man replied with a sarcastic chuckle.
The older man sat back and rested his arms across his chest. He seemed comfortable in the situation.
Hanna glinted over at the younger man as he crossed his arms and soured his face. It was obvious the situation annoyed him.