Apocalypse: The Savior with System

34 Family

The coolness of the water and the cleanliness of chlorine.

David Morgan thought of this as he swam back and forth in his private pool behind his home. With the heat of the sun in the South on his back but the soothing wetness provided by a swim, David had not felt this relaxed in weeks.

No—months.

Slicing the water with his arms, he let his mind empty of thoughts or at least tried to. He’d lived his life and survived because he knew how to compartmentalize and prioritize. It was instinct, something bred in him by a life lived in the slums and by painful experiences that followed him all throughout adulthood. But today was the day for a swim. With a parliament session drawing near, David decided to take the opportunity for some R & R.

As he came up from the water at one end of the pool, a shadow fell over him. David paused in the act of turning for another lap and raised his eyes to his secretary, a usually pleasantly-countenanced man. Yet at this moment, Billy Fiske had a frown on his face and it wasn’t because of the glare of the sun.

“What is it, Billy?” he asked, feeling that the peaceful interlude was about to come to an end.

It took Billy a moment too long to answer. David hauled himself out of the water and stood dripping in front of the other man. Toweling off can wait.

“Phelps is dead.”

What?

“Phelps…George Phelps?”

Billy nodded. “Found dead last night at the club by one of the staff in Braxton’s. But the arsenal has been taken over. Someone—or the one who killed him—must have taken the security codes.”

Braxton’s. David Morgan had never been to that club but had heard enough stories about it. He didn’t give a damn about what his people did during their personal time and for Phelps’ loyalty, David turned a blind eye against his perversions. The man did his job well.

Did.

True to his diligent nature, Billy immediately produced a tablet and handed it to David. There was a video on pause.

“Fortunately, we managed to capture her on CCTV,” said Billy, pressing the PLAY button.

“Her?”

David watched as Phelps walked out of a door, the male restroom. He stopped and was seemingly talking to someone outside the frame. Seconds later, he walked to the center of the hallway and continued to speak to someone they cannot see. Phelps moved to the left, only to move back to the right, as if he was executing a square dance. Phelps was obviously drunk.

And then, something blocked the screen.

“It’s not cut off,” Billy said quickly and they waited.

It took only a few moments before the screen went clear again and they saw Phelps lying on the floor, blood pooling from his head.

But that was not what held David’s arrested gaze.

It was the other person in the video now. A young woman in a daringly cut low white dress. A woman who was looking right up at him through the camera, a smile on her face.

A woman who was saying something.

“We’ve had someone lip read the video,” Billy told him, replaying the video and pausing at the time when she was looking up. “Phelps was definitely propositioning someone out of frame, most likely this woman, right after he came out of the restroom…”

But David was no longer listening.

I know her. I know that face.

“…and, if I may say so, she’s possibly unhinged, an expert murderess,” Billy continued, ignorant of his superior’s shock. “It was easier to read what she was saying than Phelps because of the camera angle.”

“And what was she saying?” David asked in the barest of whispers.

“I think it was,” Billy rummaged in his coat pocket and extracted a piece of paper from which he read, “‘Hello, Daddy. When are you coming to get me?’”

The tablet slipped from David’s hands, bounced off the ground, and dropped into the pool. Billy scrambled to catch it only to fail. He knelt at the edge of the pool, not noticing David who continued to stand in silence.

Daddy. Daddy. When are you coming to get me?

But it wasn’t a woman in white talking to him now. It was a little girl with orange hair and cornflower blue eyes.

“Never mind, sir. We have a copy of the video on archive,” Billy told him calmly, rising to his feet. “We’ve notified his widow of his passing, also his staff-on-leave. But what do we do about the arsenal? Our servers there are closely linked to the government’s main server, along with TOP SECRET data on Pearse-Sachly, not to mention a large containment for weapons and ammunition.”

David clenched his fists. By then the water had dried off his skin, his swimming trunks only slightly dripping to the ground. The sun had become even more relentless.

“Sir?” Billy asked, hesitantly now, finally taking notice of his boss’ tensed agitation.

David turned, glaring at Billy. His secretary took a cautious step back.

“The twins?”

“At the training grounds, sir. If we take the Millennial Black Hawks, we can get our men down there in two hours at the most. Permission to launch a Level 2 attack, sir.”

David nodded. “I want them ready to fly out at 1600 hours…arm them to the teeth.”

Billy left him to do his bidding, leaving David alone once more by the pool.

He stared at the tablet lying on the pool floor and gritted his teeth against a sense of impending doom.

“That’s strange.”

Eli looked up from hosing the courtyard off of the mess from last night and found Andie staring up at the walls surrounding the area.

“What is?”

Andie nodded in the direction of the top of the wall where a figure walked, like an ancient soldier patrolling a castle’s battlements. Every so often, a shot would ring out.

“Has she been appointed guard or something?” Andie asked. Three shots and the sound of shrieks of pain, then silence.

Eli shrugged. “Dunno, Ands. Maybe. I think she’s the best one to do that, though.”

Another two shots. The wind blew and the smell of zombie reached them, making Eli gag and Andie cough.

Andie turned to him, a questioning look on her face.

Eli’s eyes bugged out. He used the nozzle of his water hose to indicate the courtyard. “This was her handiwork. I don’t think a fly can get past such dedication to kill. She can guard this place all she wants. Half of it is hers anyway, or so I heard Rahu Knight say.”

Andie visibly shuddered and continued to hose her side of the courtyard, her eyes glancing every once in a while up at the woman called Quinn Vega. The woman was very pretty. Beautiful, actually. But the kind that made someone’s blood run cold.

“Are you cold?” Eli suddenly asked, glancing at the very visible goosebumps all over Andie’s arms.

She shook her head. The heat in Texas was almost unbearable but somewhere inside her chest, she felt like she was freezing. “No. Just a little freaked out, I guess.”

Eli nodded. “So am I. I had no idea we’d be involved in something like this when we escaped the safe zone,” he said, misunderstanding the reason for Andie’s anxiousness. “I really don’t know what’s going on and why the doctor wants to get her hands on some information so bad that she’s had Eric closeted with her in the server lab since this morning.”

“I think it’s something really important, maybe a cure,” Andie suggested, giving a start when Quinn jumped so effortlessly off the wall down to the courtyard. Oh, Andie could do the same with several air cartwheels for good measure. The jump wasn’t anything special, she thought unkindly. Eli stopped talking when Quinn walked towards their direction. Andie instinctively stepped a little behind him.

But Quinn barely paid them any attention. Armed with a long-nosed rifle, Quinn with her face and height looked like a dark, avenging angel. A fallen one. Her face was devoid of expression but when her phone suddenly rang, she answered it with a high-pitched, cheerful voice, “Hello, Grandma!” And continued into the lobby past the two gawking at her.

“She has a grandmother?!” Andie mouthed to Eli. Eli shrugged, eyebrows raised.

“She’s so weird,” Andie muttered, turning back to the blood at her feet and wincing.

With a sigh, she went back to her post and resumed with the clean-up.