“Commander,” Andrew says again.
“Yes?”
“Are you okay?”
I raise an eyebrow. Then I lift one shoulder in a halfhearted shrug.
We move, locking and loading, rolling out in patrol formation, moving from cover to cover in the dull lighting of the early morning hours. Because of the caution we must proceed with, every city block seems to take hours to travel through. In reality, it only takes a few minutes. I’m acutely aware that every building could be hiding an enemy. We all are. Our rescue unit moves through the neighborhood with the silence and prowess of cats. Our presence here should go completely unnoticed — if all goes well.
By the time we reach the urban epicenter of Los Angeles, the classy, abandoned neighborhoods are no more. What remains is the part of Los Angeles that I was more familiar with as a child. The apartment complexes, the liquor stores crammed side by side with beauty parlors and pawnshops. Before the apocalypse, this was a bad area. It’s almost improved with anarchy. There’s not a soul in sight.
There is graffiti on the walls. Shapes and symbols in bright colors. Semper Fi is painted in yellow letters across a billboard for men’s cologne. Weeds are growing through the cracks in the pavement, twisting around rusty cars and dead streetlights.
“Red light,” Uriah mutters, standing at an intersection. The stoplights are bent, hanging at odd angles. A pile of rubble sits in the middle of the street. The back half of a strip of stores has been blown open. By the looks of it, it happened quite a while ago, too.
Wait a second.
I take a few steps closer to the back of the buildings. A deep crater is there. Black, charred, ashy soot is smeared along the remains of the structures. And in the center of the crater is a passenger jet. Or what’s left of it. It’s huge. The cabin alone spans the length of five shops. It looks like something exploded inside, causing the ceiling to rupture. The plane is sitting in two halves — as if it split right down the middle.
“This is one of the planes that went down the night the EMP hit,” I breathe. “I heard them go down. I saw the first one.”
“Nobody walked away from this,” Vera remarks. “They died on impact.”
“How many planes went down that night, do you think?” Uriah asks.
“However many got the brunt of the EMP’s attack,” I answer. “Some planes are protected from that kind of thing, and a lot of them were probably fine. But not all of them. Not enough.”
What a horrible way to die. Hurtling to your death in a metal box, in a room full of strangers. None of the people that died here would even know why they were going to die. They probably thought it was a bomb or a freak accident.
How many children were on this plane?
I shudder.
“We should keep moving,” I say. “It’s not safe to stop.”
I pull away from the decimated passenger jet, silently mourning the innocent civilians that died here. Everything within the city block has been totaled — destroyed by the explosion of the crashing plane.
I could have easily been caught in one of those explosions that night.
But I wasn’t. Why did so many people survive — and why did others die? Why did mothers and infants and children have to lose their lives? They were innocent. Why did Omega’s takeover require so much bloodshed?
It’s an impossible question to answer.
We find two more passenger jets within the next hour. All of them were either landing or taking off from the Los Angeles International Airport — or LAX, as it’s more commonly called.
Or was called.
I wonder if my mother survived the EMP? I think.
Since Omega’s invasion, I have often wondered if my mother is alive. Where was she when the EMP hit? Did she leave the city? Did she escape Los Angeles before Omega attacked it with a chemical weapon?
Despite the fact that I was never close with my mother, it bothers me that I will never know what happened to her. And I guess that puts me in the same boat as millions of other people. People that have no idea what happened to their family members and friends.
Through everything, my focus was on two things: survival and finding my father. Once I found my father, survival was still my main focus. It still is, I guess. Only now I’m surviving for a reason. Surviving to fight Omega another day.
“Here’s what worries me,” Uriah says in a low voice, falling into step with me. “If Los Angeles was attacked by a chemical weapon, are we breathing poison right now?”
“Unlikely,” Andrew answers, overhearing us. “I’m betting that Omega used Sarin. We’ll be safe to walk through the city without dying of radiation poisoning.”
“What’s Sarin?” I ask.
“It’s an odorless, deadly poison,” Andrew replies. “Before the EMP, there was a lot of it being used in the war in the Middle East. It’s a popular way to attack people without firing a shot.”
“How long does Sarin last?” I say. “The effects, I mean?”
“On the body? It doesn’t take more than a teaspoon to kill you.” He shrugs. “It doesn’t really linger in the air, though. We’d be dead already if it were still here.”
“Good to know,” Uriah says. “We could be breathing in poisoned air.”
“That’s the chance you have to take, coming back into Los Angeles,” Andrew points out. “Besides, if Omega has set up headquarters here, it’s got to be safe.”
Good point.
Then again, Omega might know something that we don’t.
As we burrow into the heart of the city, I see signs of Omega’s presence. Posters and billboards have been covered over with the Omega symboclass="underline" the white O containing the continents of the world. One poster is taped to the inside of an abandoned storefront window:
Uriah says, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that registering for the census is a command, not a suggestion,” Vera answers. “Anybody left alive in this city is probably registering. There’s no such thing as flying under the radar once you give them your information.”
“If they don’t already have it,” Andrew says. “Omega could probably pull up information on every citizen in the state based on Facebook pages alone.”
“But the EMP wiped out the computers,” Uriah replies.
“It didn’t wipe out everything,” Andrew counters. “Remember, Omega’s got satellites and televisions and access to the digital cloud. The EMP was directed to wipe out our access to technology — not theirs.”
“So you’re saying my Facebook page is still accessible to Omega?” Uriah says.
“You had a Facebook page?” I remark, grinning. “What was your relationship status?”
He grimaces.
“Probably ‘it’s complicated,’” Andrew snickers.
Uriah whacks the back of Andrew’s shoulder, and I laugh for the first time in hours. But when you really stop to think about it, there’s a massive pool of information on the Internet that Omega could use to pull up information on anyone they want. That’s how they found out where my dad used to work. That’s how they knew Chris was a Navy SEAL.