Prologue – The Aftermath
Gunshots could still be heard going off in the distance. Sirens echoed in the city, fires lighting up the darkness, and somewhere, people were screaming. No doubt there were stores being looted as people desperately tried to take anything they could, despite it would mean nothing in the end. It was, for lack of any other way to describe it, Hell on earth.
A police cruiser raced by as the auburn haired girl pried her way out of the wreckage debris that was formerly a transport van. A few scratches, a bruise or two, but she was otherwise in one piece. The driver of the van, sadly, could not say the same. What was left of him that wasn't smeared through the windshield or over the dashboard, at least.
The girl fought down a surge of nausea in the pit of her stomach as she rifled through the front of the van. A pair of pre-loaded cash cards and a smartphone in the glovebox, an GPS tracker unit, and what looked like a tablet in the slide out compartment under the front passenger seat. Her gut wretched as she carefully checked the pockets of the dead driver, pulling out a heavy access key and a smaller flash drove sized device.
"Sorry, Reed," she muttered under her breath as she tried to keep her disgust at what she was having to do from making her sick. Taking a moment to close her eyes and breath deep, the girl climbed out of the wreckage of the van and reached the sidewalk moments before her stomach gave in to the nausea and forced her to vomit on the side of the road.
Another cruiser went roaring by, followed by a heavily armored SWAT van. The light bars were going at full blaze while sirens screeched as the pair raced off toward downtown. As it was, she was going to be lucky to get out of central Los Angeles without being further noticed by her pursuers, and hopefully none of the cops that were heading into the chaos of downtown LA were on Chronos payroll.
Chronos. Just thinking that name was enough to make her stomach wretch again and spill what was left of her last meal out onto the pavement. What they had done, what they had been doing to lead up to this point. And the fact of how she had gotten dragged into all this because of her father.
Where was he in all this, she pondered for a moment. As she made sure her boots were tightened and zipped up the tattered leather jacket she wore, the brunette took a breath again, eyes closed as she fought down the sensations of sick at the thought of the entire series of events that had led to this. Less than a week ago, the only thing concerning her had been high school, keeping herself out detention and off the radar of the cheerleaders who felt it was best to be horrible to anyone definable as not in their clique.
Her life had been that of any other normal sixteen year old. Who just happened to be the daughter of a bioscience expert who had smuggled some very insane alien bioweapons out of the research group he worked for. Which had turned out to actually be a front for a hidden illuminati style group that had been engineering a take over of human civilization for the last few hundred years.
Which apparently her father had been aware the entire time he'd been working for them, and had been working toward until recently. Which all in all made her reconsider how well she knew her own family...