The Omegas Awakening

Abandoned

The call came at 0430.

Serena was already awake — she rarely slept more than a few hours at a time anymore, and the dreams had been getting worse — when the intercom in Building 14 crackled to life and Davenport's voice, flat and bored, announced the deployment list.

"Gamma-level danger. Eight volunteers required. Double rations for three months upon return. Omega volunteers accepted for cargo transport only. Names are as follows."

She listened as the list was read out. Rex. Theo. Luna. Five others she didn't know.

And then: "Serena Vale. Logistics support. Vehicle cargo."

She sat up in her cot, heart pounding.

Zara was awake beside her. "You're going," she said. Not a question.

"I don't have a choice."

"You always have a choice. You just don't always like the options."

Serena dressed quickly in the dark. Cargo transport. The words echoed in her head. That was all she was ever allowed to be — a pair of hands to carry things, a body to fill a quota, a warm body to send into danger because no one cared if warm bodies came back.

But she'd volunteered. Or someone had signed her name. She didn't remember doing either.

She found out at the motor pool.

Marcus was standing by the lead vehicle — a reinforced Humvee with extra armor plating and a mounted g*n on the roof. He was in full combat gear, his face painted with camouflage, his jaw set in that expression she'd learned to fear.

He looked at her as she approached. For a moment — just a moment — something moved in his eyes. Recognition. Regret. She couldn't tell which.

"Vale," he said. "You're on cargo detail. Stay in the vehicle unless I tell you otherwise. Your job is to protect the supply crates. If we get hit, you run. Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good." He turned away. Then he stopped. "Vale."

"Sir?"

"Be careful."

He walked off before she could respond.

---

The convoy rolled out at 0500. Three vehicles, eight personnel, heading northeast toward what the briefing packet called "the Atlanta Metro Exclusion Zone" — a forty-mile stretch of highway and suburb that had been written off three months ago as a total loss. There were supposedly supplies there, cached by a retreating military unit, and the intelligence report said the area had been quiet.

Intelligence reports were often wrong.

Serena was in the rear vehicle with Rex and Luna. Theo rode in the lead truck with Marcus. The other four soldiers were split between the middle vehicle and the gunner position on the Humvee's roof.

She'd been on supply runs before. She knew the rhythm — the nervous silence of the first hour, the gradual relaxation as distance grew from the safe zone, the false confidence that settled in when nothing happened.

This run was different.

The silence from the start was wrong. Not the silence of routine, but the silence of predators. The highway was clear — too clear, debris pushed to the shoulders, no abandoned vehicles, no bodies. As if someone had cleaned up.

"They moved everything," Theo said over the radio, his voice tight. "Every car, every body. Someone cleared this road."

"That's good, right?" Luna asked from the back seat. "Means the route is safe?"

"Means something's hunting," Rex said. He was cleaning his rifle with methodical precision, the bolt carrier group in his lap, his hands moving without looking. "And it knows how to clean up after itself."

No one responded to that.

They made it thirty miles before the ambush.

---

The first explosion hit the lead vehicle at 11:47 AM.

Serena was dozing in the back seat — she'd learned to sleep whenever the opportunity presented itself, a skill that had saved her sanity more than once — and the blast threw her forward against the seat in front of her. The world became noise and motion: screaming metal, shouted orders, the sharp c***k of gunfire splitting the air.

"CONTACT! CONTACT! MULTIPLE TARGETS!"

She didn't see what happened to the lead vehicle. The second truck had spun to a stop, its rear doors blown off, and through the gap she could see shapes moving in the smoke — not the slow shamble of individual infected, but the coordinated rush of something intelligent.

The radio screamed. Marcus's voice, broken by static: "SECOND TRUCK, PULL BACK! REPEAT, PULL BACK TO—"

Static. Nothing.

Rex grabbed her arm. "Vale. The crates. Get the crates out of the truck."

"What?"

"The supply crates. In the back. We're not losing them." He shoved a rifle into her hands. "You know how to shoot?"

She stared at the weapon. "I've filed manifests for guns. I've never—"

"Then don't shoot. Just point and pull if something comes at you." He was already moving toward the gap in the truck, his rifle up, his body coiled for violence. "Get those crates out. NOW."

She moved.

The back of the truck was chaos — supply crates piled against the shattered doors, some of them split open, their contents spilling across the floor. She grabbed the nearest one — heavy, marked with medical supply codes, the kind of thing that could save lives — and hauled it toward the tailgate.

Behind her, Rex was fighting.

She could hear him — the sharp reports of his rifle, the grunt of impact, the wet sounds that meant someone was dying. She didn't look. She couldn't look. She grabbed another crate and dragged it toward the opening.

Luna appeared beside her, her medic bag over one shoulder, blood on her hands that wasn't her own.

"Serena. Can you drive?"

"What?"

"Can you drive a stick?"

"I— yeah. I think so."

Luna pointed at the cab. "Get in the driver's seat. Keep the engine running. When I say go, you floor it."

"Luna, what's happening—"

"Serena." Luna grabbed her face with both hands. Her eyes were fierce, focused, the eyes of someone who had already accepted what was coming. "You get out of here. You take the crates and you get out. Do you understand?"

"I'm not leaving you—"

"You're not leaving me. You're doing your job. Your job is cargo. This is cargo." She pressed something into Serena's hand — a key. "Drive. Now. I'll hold them off."

She was gone before Serena could argue.

---

She didn't remember getting into the driver's seat. She didn't remember starting the engine. She remembered Luna's face, fierce and afraid and brave. She remembered the sounds behind her — gunfire, screaming, the wet noise of things dying.

She remembered Rex shouting something she couldn't hear over the roaring in her ears.

She remembered Marcus's voice on the radio, fragmentary and broken: *"—Vale, get out, do you copy, GET OUT—"*

She remembered the crates in the back, heavy and important, and the road ahead, and the absolute certainty that if she stopped she would die.

So she drove.

The road stretched out in front of her, cracked and littered with debris she dodged by instinct. She drove for what felt like hours — the sun climbing overhead, then beginning its descent, shadows lengthening across the empty highway. She didn't stop. She didn't look back.

She reached the extraction point at 4:23 PM.

It was a traffic roundabout on the northern edge of the exclusion zone, marked with the orange and black pylons that military convoys used for rendezvous. The intel had said the extraction team would be waiting.

No one was there.

She waited.

The sun set. The temperature dropped. She sat in the cab with the engine running and the headlights cutting uselessly into the dark and the crates in the back and the silence that pressed against her like a living thing.

At 9:00 PM, she heard engines.

She sat up, hope flaring in her chest — and then dying, just as quickly, when she saw the vehicles emerge from the darkness.

They were military trucks. Three of them. And they were coming from the direction of the safe zone.

She stepped out of the cab, her legs unsteady, her hands shaking, and she raised her arm to flag them down.

The lead vehicle slowed as it approached. She could see faces in the windows — soldiers, Alphas, people in uniforms she recognized.

Marcus was in the passenger seat of the lead truck.

She ran toward them. "Captain Cole! Captain, we were hit, I made it to extraction, the others were still fighting when I—"

"Vale." His voice cut through her words like a blade. He wasn't looking at her. He was looking through her. "Step back."

"What?"

"Step. Back."

She stopped. She was standing in the middle of the road, the headlights of three military trucks blazing into her face, and the man who had told her to be careful six hours ago was looking at her like she was nothing.

Marcus turned to someone in the back seat. A voice she couldn't see said something. He nodded.

The convoy started moving again.

It didn't stop.

She stood in the road and watched the trucks drive past her — watched the faces in the windows, the soldiers who didn't look at her, the world that had decided she wasn't worth saving — and she waited for someone to stop. To come back. To say her name.

In the second truck, just before it passed, she saw Luna in the back seat.

Luna was looking at her.

Their eyes met. Serena saw Luna's mouth form a word. She couldn't hear it over the engines, but she could read it clearly.

*I'm sorry.*

Then Luna turned away. Looked out the other window. Looked at nothing.

And the convoy drove on.

She stood there until the taillights disappeared into the darkness. Until the sound of engines faded. Until the silence came back, heavier than before.

Then she sat down on the cracked asphalt and she cried.

She cried until she couldn't anymore. Until the tears stopped and the emptiness came back and the thing inside her — the thing that had been waiting, all this time — finally opened its eyes.

---

She walked into the unknown zone at midnight.

The GPS was useless — no signal, no data, no map. She followed the road north, away from the safe zone, away from the city, away from everything she'd ever known. The crates in the truck meant nothing now. She'd been carrying supplies for people who had decided she was trash. She left the truck after three miles, when the fuel gauge dropped to empty, and she took only what she could carry: her radio, her flashlight, a bottle of water, a protein bar.

And her Omega brand, burning against her wrist like a promise.

The road turned into a dirt path. The dirt path turned into nothing. She walked through the dark, guided by nothing but the stars overhead and the voice in her head that told her to keep going.

*Keep going.*

*Keep going.*

*Keep going.*

She didn't know what she was walking toward. She didn't know if anything was waiting for her at the end. She only knew that staying still meant dying, and she wasn't ready to die. Not yet. Not until she understood what she was.

The unknown zone stretched out before her, black and silent and endless.

She walked into it.

And somewhere, in the distance, something that had been waiting finally stopped waiting.