Red Zone (Red Zone 1)

He pointed up. “Look, chère.”

Anxiously, cautiously, she did. There was a hole in the cave ceiling. Someone had made a wooden trap for it, presumably to keep out the weather. The trap was open. It was daylight.

And the sky was red.

Her hands shot out to grip the edge of the table. “We’re in the Red Zone?” It was a whisper. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. But, above her, there was a thick cloud of red covering the large opening where the sky should have been. She shot to her feet as panic hit her like a blow to the stomach, making her nauseous. “We need to run. It isn’t safe.”

A strong hand grasped her arm, holding her firmly in place. “Sit down. You’re safe here. You think I’d let something bad happen to you?”

She forced herself to look at Striker instead of the exit. “I think you’d be willing to let me die if it suited your purpose.”

“Ouch!” someone said.

He glowered at her. “Well, it don’t suit my purpose none. Now sit your cute ass down and listen.”

She looked at the rest of the team. No one else seemed in a hurry to run screaming from the Red Zone. In fact, they all sat calmly watching her. Slowly, she lowered herself to her seat, grasping Striker’s hand and holding on tight. Suddenly his penchant for invading her personal space was a comfort rather than an irritant.

He muttered something in a reassuring tone in a language she didn’t understand, before switching to English. “Good girl. I know this is a lot to take in. Are you okay?”

She swallowed. “Don’t say ‘good girl.’ It’s patronizing.”

There were chuckles, and he smiled wryly at his team. “Guess that’s a yes.” He turned his attention back to her. “Remember I told you that the red mist lifted from the water first?”

She nodded, although that conversation seemed like a lifetime ago.

“It lifted from other places, too. It just took a little longer. This cave system is one of them. The mist sits a few feet above it.”

His words acted like a switch in her mind. It flicked from scared to curious. In an instant, the adrenaline flooding her system and telling her to escape rushed to her mind and prodded her to demand answers. She relaxed. This was her comfort zone—analysis, research, study.

“Did it leave residue? Is it safe? What if it moves again and comes back down? Are you monitoring it? Are you sure the cave system is empty?”

“And she’s back.” Striker’s smile made her insides warm in a way she didn’t fully understand. “Nothing stops that big brain of yours for long.”

“The mist won’t come back into the caves.” Doc pulled up a chair on the opposite side of the table. “It’s been steadily dispersing from this area for years. We monitor it closely. Its distance from the cave increases each day. It’s slow, but it’s definitely moving away. If it changed direction and suddenly started to fall again, we’d know instantly. There is no residue in the caves. The red mist only lingers on biological matter. All of this”—he gestured to the furniture—“was salvaged from the mist. It’s safe. If it wasn’t, you’d be dead already.”

It didn’t slip her notice that he’d said she’d be dead, not they’d be dead. She added that little slip to the list she was compiling of things she needed more information on.

“How long have you been here? How long have you been monitoring the mist over the caves? How did you find this place? How did you find out about the paths through the mist, anyway?” Now that she thought about it, that should have been a question to ask a whole lot earlier.

“One question at a time.” Striker held up a hand to slow her down. “Okay, first, we’ve been monitoring the mist over the caves for about three years. That’s the same amount of time we’ve been mapping the paths through the mist.”

“Are you out of your minds? How could you do something so dangerous?” She gaped at them. “Do you all have a death wish? How did you know when you followed a path that it wouldn’t close in on you? How did you know you’d be able to get out without getting hurt? Are you stupid?”

“The stupid part is something we can debate another time,” Striker said wryly. “As to how long we’ve been here.” The room suddenly grew serious, heavy even. The words he was about to say were there already, hanging in the air between them. The hairs on Friday’s arms stood to attention. She knew whatever he said would change her life forever—what she had left of it.

“We’ve been here, in these caves, for about a hundred and three years. Give or take a month or two. But we’ve only been awake for about three years. The rest of the time we were unconscious.”

There was an expectant silence as everyone waited for her reaction. She couldn’t speak. She could barely comprehend what he was telling her. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t real. She was hallucinating. A side effect of the poison she’d taken.

“It’s not possible,” she whispered. “You were unconscious for a century?”

She looked at each of them in turn. There was no humor in the

room. The atmosphere was deadly serious. As shocked as she was, her eyes still scanned for data. They appeared healthy. They seemed to range in age from mid-twenties to mid-thirties. It wasn’t possible that they’d been unconscious for a century. He was talking about stasis. And the scientific community had given up on that idea decades earlier. People placed in stasis didn’t come out right once they awakened. It was too unstable a practice. Too dangerous. She shook her head. “It isn’t possible.”

“Yeah, we thought that, too.” Striker gave her hair a little tug to get her attention. “All we know is that one minute we were fighting for the United States in the Technology Wars, and the next minute we woke up in these caves.” He paused, clenching her hand tight. “And, we woke up changed.”

Slowly, he reached up with his free hand and tugged off the flexi-patch that covered his eye. The eyelid on his hidden eye lifted, and she found herself staring into the vertical pupil of a bright yellow iris. It wasn’t the eye of a human being. It was the eye of a reptile.