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

of the bullets never came. The gunfire ceased. In the surreal peace of the moment, bitter, billowing smoke hung in the air, swaying back and forth.

When Mr. Ellerby realized the worst was over, he opened his eyes and let go of his wife. He turned over and found the woman who’d been holding them hostage lying on the floor, her unblinking eyes staring up at the ceiling. Her body was riddled with bullet holes, including a crater on the top of her head.

Ellerby’s eyes shifted to the back door where a blonde woman stood holding a pistol amid a fog of gun smoke. He rounded on the woman who’d come through the front and saw Emily standing there with her pistol likewise extended.

“Are you two okay?” Emily asked. “Are you hit?”

Ellerby shook his head, checked his wife, who also acknowledged she was okay, and said, “We’re…okay.”

“Good,” Emily said. She ejected the magazine from the gun well and replaced it with a second from inside the folds of her jacket. “Any others?”

“No,” Mrs. Ellerby said. “Just the ones outside.”

“They’re taken care of,” June announced. “I’ll check the rest of the house to make sure.”

Emily bobbed her head in approval, and June disappeared around the corner into the kitchen.

Mr. Ellerby stood reluctantly, mortified at the bloodbath that had taken place in his home. “Did…you just kill FBI agents?”

“They aren’t FBI agents,” Emily said as she holstered her weapon. She walked around the edge of the couch and stopped over the body of Darcy Friedman. Emily bent down and peeled back the collar of the dead woman’s shirt. Again, the ankh tattoo appeared just below the ear. “They are something else altogether.”

30

Cartersville

Dak saw the danger coming from a mile away. Maybe not a literal mile, but it might as well have been.

He’d arrived at the McElroys’ property exactly fifty-three minutes after the text from Alex and Tara. He’d sensed the urgency in the message, and prepared for the worst.

He made it to the cabin without being detected, which included by those within the confines of the cabin. From what he could tell, whatever threat Alex had been afraid of hadn’t arrived yet. Dak didn’t know how much time he had, but he assumed it to be virtually none. If the two lab rats from IAA were afraid of someone following them, their pursuers would have either been close behind the targets or amassing their forces to launch an all-out assault.

Dak left his truck in the woods just up the road, within view of the driveway but far enough away that it wouldn’t arouse suspicion. He slung his pack over his shoulders, holstered two pistols, and marched into the woods with an AR15 carbine held high and tight to his chest. The carbine-length barrel was a happy medium between the pistol and rifle lengths and would give him more options if the battle to come changed distances or terrain.

The weight of the bags and extra magazines on his belt and legs only slowed him down slightly. Dak was in his prime, and a small part of him relished the rigorous nature of a mission like this. That’s what it was—to him, anyway. He couldn’t look at it like anything else. People’s lives hung in the balance, people he knew and cared about.

His time with Tara and Alex had been limited thus far, but he’d grown to like the two and, more importantly, to trust them. He knew they were capable of defending themselves, but based on another text from Alex, they had three middle-school kids with them, and the last thing Dak wanted was for a bunch of kids to be the targets of some hit squad. Even if they survived, the mental torment of enduring a gun battle was something no child should have to go through.

He’d seen it with some of his comrades from the battles they’d fought in the Middle East, from the missile attacks that hit the barracks in the dead of night, or from waking to the sounds of gunfire in the early hours of dawn. Those men he called friends and brothers had faced a much tougher adversary after the battles ended. PTSD was a very real and powerful enemy, and it wasn’t one that could simply be dispatched with a gun.

Dak felt lucky he’d never experienced symptoms of that malady. He always figured he was just wired differently than other folks. The sounds of guns or explosions didn’t startle him the way they did so many others. It merely jerked him into action, and when it was over he went back to breathing the same way he had before.

These thoughts flitted in and out of his mind as he disappeared into the forest, leaving behind only the bright moonlight of the cloudless sky. He was happy to be back in the darkness. He could hide in it, use it to his advantage.

When the driveway came into view again, he slowed his pace and picked a spot behind a thicket of shrubs to set up shop.

Dak set his bag on the ground and opened the main flap. He removed two claymore-style mines he’d built in his shop back in Tennessee and set the remote detonator on the ground next to the pack. He checked around again when he heard the sound of a distant car on the highway, but the tires on asphalt swelled then dissipated.

Hurrying to the driveway with the two mines, Dak found a log next to the gravel path and positioned one mine next to it in such a way that no one would see it as they approached the cabin.

Then, he took the second mine about twenty paces back toward the road and found a stump a few feet off the driveway. Dak repeated the setup of the first mine and then returned to the shrubs where he’d left the rest of his gear.

He cocked his head to the left and then right, both to loosen up and to keep himself alert.