Alien Invasion 04 Annihilation

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Book: Alien Invasion 04 Annihilation Read Online Free PDF
Author: Sean Platt & Johnny B. Truant
they’d no more obliterated the actual lab than they had their five-person troupe during the trip here.  
    Cameron wanted to nod, to mouth something to Charlie and Piper about those who’d stayed behind. Had the few lab techs and others who’d remained been abducted into the mothership? Had they been killed to prove a point? Cameron had been assuming they’d arrive to find nothing, despite his insistence on coming here — because, honestly, it was this or wander forever. Their only hope of finding Thor’s Hammer was at Moab if it hadn’t died with his father, but Cameron was realizing now that he’d been certain they’d find only ash and ruin.  
    And yet if the lab was standing, there was a chance people had been left alive.  
    Charlie didn’t see what Cameron was trying to say. He was already ducking though the entrance. And Andreus, whose daughter had been among those remaining (killed, abducted, or run away) was nowhere close enough to catch Cameron’s eye.  
    He looked at the only person left: Piper. But she was already following Charlie, ducking inside, shifting the fallen beam that had done little more than block the entrance.  
    The lights were off, all of the old power sources either destroyed or shut down by Terrence’s virus. Charlie might know where to check a generator, but ahead of Cameron in the gloom, the tall scientist simply lit his flashlight. The thing had a wide beam, more like a camping lantern. Charlie made its glow as broad as it went and shone it around in the eerie silence.  
    “Ransacked,” he said.  
    Piper seemed to feel none of Cameron’s in-the-dark trepidation. Their roles had almost reversed: She was the brave one, and he seemed to have grown a timid heart. Cameron had become the group’s most tentative. Mile by mile, Benjamin’s death had settled on his shoulders like a heavy cloak. It made him hesitate. He’d lost enough, and couldn’t bear to lose more.  
    But Piper had gone ahead with Charlie, flicking on her own flashlight. She was moving ahead, going farther. From where Cameron was standing, he could see that Charlie’s one-word assessment had it pretty much covered. The place had been tossed, every neat pile of research sifted and thrown aside as if by impatient hands.
    “Why is the building still here?” Piper asked, fingering a stack of papers. Then, as if remembering, her head moved toward the ceiling as if she could see the mothership through the rock. Wondering, perhaps, if the Astrals had merely been waiting for the mice to come home before closing the trap.  
    “They need to know where the Hammer is,” Charlie said. “We’re on the same quest. They want to turn it on, and we want to turn it off, but that doesn’t change the fact that finding it benefits us both. They wouldn’t destroy the place any more than I would.”  
    Cameron had been scanning the space, his eyes absorbing disorder. The entrance was behind them, outside light already feeling feebly distant. He had his own flashlight but hadn’t lit it. Now, in the rocking shadows made by Piper’s and Charlie’s lights, something struck Cameron as wrong. A shadow that moved the wrong way. An echo, perhaps, of what he’d seen outside before they’d entered.
    His hand came up. His light clicked on. Cameron speared the spot where he’d seen the disobedient shadow but saw only the coffee room’s open door. For some reason, seeing it gave him a pang of sadness. Ivan had called that plain old coffee room the communications room, and Cameron had sat in there for hours beside his father, holding vigil, waiting to hear from Terrence or Franklin — whom Piper had met before his irrational end.  
    “What?” Piper asked, noting his urgent gesture.  
    “I thought I saw something.”  
    Piper turned, her body language changing. Something had been in here, not from this planet. They’d recently left a cave in the rock filled with alien predators. The feeling of being trapped in another with
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