The Milestone Protocol by Ernest Dempsey (best books to read in your 20s txt) 📕

and grabbed a full one, all while on the run. He slammed the magazine into the well and jerked back the slide to chamber the first round.

“Come on!” he shouted to Adriana and Niki as he charged past. Tommy was close on his heels.

Adriana and Niki rushed after them, full of questions that would clearly have to wait.

One of the gunmen emerged from the corner and took aim at Sean, but he hadn’t expected himself to be the target, or to have Sean rushing headlong toward him.

Sean’s pistol was already trained on the gunman, and he fired several times, missing wildly with four shots that plunked into the wall. Two struck true, though, and dropped the man to the floor.

Two others popped out from the other side, ready to avenge their comrade, but they caught hot rounds from Sean’s and Tommy’s blazing pistols as the two unleashed an inescapable barrage.

Sean got to the elevator first and punched the button, hoping he wouldn’t have to wait for the lift to come back down. Fortunately, the doors opened right away, and he waited for the other three to board before he got on.

Tommy pressed the button for the control room and then mashed the button to make the doors close faster, which never worked.

After two seconds that felt like years, the doors closed, and the elevator began its ascent.

“What happened?” Adriana asked.

Sean breathed hard. “Killed Magnus.” He gasped again. “Shot the gems. Reversed the power. Just like Alex said.”

“So, what happens now?” Niki asked, his voice distant, probably far away in the past.

“We’re not sure,” Tommy huffed. “But it doesn’t sound good.”

“I think it’s safe to assume this place is going to blow,” Adriana said. She swallowed hard. “We may not make it out in time.”

The doors opened, and the four leaped out.

“We have to try,” Sean said, leading the way back down the passage toward the control room.

They arrived to find Dak and the others holding down their positions, and a gruesome display of bodies piled up around the entrance.

“There they are!” Tara shouted, pointing from behind an overturned table.

“Did you do it?” Alex asked.

Sean and the others lingered by the corner of the room. “Uh, yeah. I think so. But what does that do if we reverse the energy flow?”

Alex shrugged. “No idea.”

“You told me to do something like that without knowing what would happen?”

“Hey, you asked for an idea. I gave you one.”

“Fair enough. What’s the situation?”

Dak took over. “Holding down the exit. Thought they might try to tear-gas us or maybe use some kind of explosives, but they just kept sending guys in. Haven’t fired a shot in ten minutes.”

“They’ll all be evacuating now,” Sean said. “We need to do the same.”

“I’ll take point,” Emily said, motioning to June to join her.

The two women carefully swept the corridor around the corner and then jolted into the intersection between hallways. There were no other troops waiting for them.

“Clear!” June shouted.

“Clear!” Emily echoed.

Everyone in the control room left their cover and scurried to the exit. Emily and June pushed up, running at half speed with weapons drawn and held low as they approached the elevator.

The woman’s voice overhead grew louder as they neared one of the speakers, the same evacuation warning blaring through the corridor.

June arrived at the elevator first and pressed the button.

The doors opened. She and Emily jammed their weapon inside but found it empty.

They stood by the outside as the others ran in. The rumbling grew more frequent, and the floor shook. The woman’s voice in the speaker twisted and glitched. More voices came from the other end of the hallway, and a second later, reinforcements appeared with guns drawn.

“Get in,” Emily ordered.

June slid sideways into the elevator, popping off rounds at the attackers to give the Axis director cover.

One man fell with a bullet to the thigh. Another with one to the abdomen. Sean and Tommy joined in as Emily retreated into the elevator mere seconds before the doors shut.

The sound of bullets peppering the exterior riddled the lift as it climbed to safety and away from the bottom floor.

The elevator bumped and creaked. Sean instinctively reached for a handrail as his infamous fear of heights and falling kicked in. He gripped the rail with a steel fist, his knuckles turning white as the nightmare he’d had so many times before started playing out in reality.

Adriana reached over and put her arm around him. “We’re going to make it,” she said.

“I know,” he lied.

Few things terrified Sean like the fear of falling. It was his kryptonite.

Tommy patted his friend on the shoulder. Emily, too, consoled him by covering his hand on the rail with her own.

A heavy sideways bump nearly caused the occupants to lose their balance.

Then the doors opened. The group shoved off the elevator and into the next corridor. Sean was glad to be out of one deathtrap, but up ahead lay another.

The maintenance elevator was a shorter ride, but equally as terrifying.

Once everyone was on board, Dak hit the buttons on the control panel to send the thing upward.

Inside the open rocky shaft, Sean could see the cables twitch with every shift from the mountain. The corners of the lift were stabilized on every side with wheels in metal tracks, but it still rocked back and forth every second of the ascent.

Sean kept expecting the cable to snap and drop them back down to their doom, but the steel threading remained intact, and the last of their elevator rides reached the top without incident.

The scene that played out before them, however, was sheer chaos.

Cult SUVs sped away down the road toward the mountain exit. Troops rushed down the catwalks on foot, desperate to escape whatever was causing the evacuation warning to sound.

“Everyone in the first truck!” Sean shouted. “I’ll drive.”

“Shotgun,” Adriana said as they dashed from the elevator to the cargo truck.

The rest of the group climbed into the back while Sean and his wife hopped up the steps into the cab. Sean