Beyond Armageddon: Book 02 - Empire Read Online Free PDF Page A

and Georgia . Big question marks rested over Alabama and northern Florida where the map cut off.

    Trevor liked how the Baltimore New Press handled their war coverage. At the bottom of the same page, a statistic printed in bold gave meaning to the effort.

    People liberated: 563,241.

    That number, Trevor knew, came from his ‘Census Bureau.’ That number also sounded incredibly big. To have found so many people over the years seemed improbable. Yet Trevor knew that the areas they now controlled had once been home to 36 million people. This roughly translated into a 1.5% survival rate, meaning more than 35 million people in those areas died during Armageddon.

    That accounted for the large patches of vacant towns and untraveled roads inside the ‘liberated’ zone. The number of saved people sounded large, but in reality was frighteningly small.

    The 1.5% included large numbers of slaves freed from invaders who had beaten and worked them nearly to death for as long as five years.

    Trevor felt a gentle shove as the Eagle increased speed. He hoped Rick would make good time. He wanted to get home fast; he had not seen his son for nearly a week.

    During the first year of survival, Trevor thought he managed to grasp the rules of the new world: alien monsters lurking in every shadow and extraterrestrial armies trying to carve out zones of control. The key to victory, he knew, lay in finding survivors in the ruins and freeing hostages from alien captors.

    Then came the curveball that challenged his understanding of it all: the 1.5% survival rate also included people who had “rode the ark”.

    Oh, there were many names for the people who emerged through time and space covered in globs of green goo: Sleepers. Angels. Returnees. With time, one name won out: these people had “rode the ark.”

    A fitting description, no doubt, because they disappeared during the early days of the calamity with no explanation. Most—including the U.S. government when there had still been a functioning U.S. government—believed those people vaporize. Not so.

    Some force plucked them away from the fire of the Apocalypse just before or just as it started. Much as Noah saved his family and the animals before the Biblical great flood.

    Trevor’s pre-war fiancée—Ashley Trump—and her entire neighborhood ‘rode the ark.’ What a surprise it had been when the vanished people of her neighborhood appeared out of nowhere one day, encased in coffin-like blobs of goo.

    That was the way of those who ‘rode the ark.’ They were not merely waiting around hoping to be discovered. They appeared in areas shortly after that area came under human control, always within a certain distance from where they had disappeared.

    For instance, missing cadets and teachers at the naval academy in Annapolis suddenly returned to the land of the living less than a week after Trevor personally led the assault clearing the city of ‘hostiles’. Those cadets and teachers reappeared scattered across campus.

    The story always sounded the same with each of those blessed people. The same as Ashley’s story: they never saw it coming.

    In Ashley’s case, while speaking on the phone with Trevor she suddenly felt a hot flash…and then opened her eyes as Trevor and Dante Jones pulled her from a case of green goo.

    What did she remember?

    She remembered talking with Trevor on the phone. Yet on some level, she understood things had changed. Not a complete understanding. She did not experience that passing of time, but knew it occurred.

    In practice, for those who ‘rode the ark’ no real time elapsed. Their bodies either time-traveled or entered some sort of perfect stasis.

    People suffering broken bones or a cough and cold or a headache when they disappeared awoke with those broken bones unhealed or with a sneeze on their lips or the desperate need for an aspirin. For them, awakening inside the slimy sarcophagi had simply been the next moment.

    As random as