Nemesis: Book Five Read Online Free PDF Page A

up, and all she had to do was look at her sweat on the floor to understand that.
    Where's a thermostat?
    She turned from the painting, forgetting it for the moment, and searched the walls for something that could turn down the temperature. The room was huge, but she scanned the whole thing quickly. Nothing. Only the white light looking back at her, though it had lost the calm of before. Now it looked like the white, glaring light she might have seen in an interrogation room. All the beauty gone.
    She looked to her left at the bird.
    Was it smiling at her?
    Its beak open and it finally silent, staring right at her. Marks' face beneath a tattered mass of flesh, pink sticking out every which way, the tan skin nearly nonexistent.
    She needed to get out of here. She didn't know exactly why, but she felt it the same as she felt the heat starting to wrap around her. Rigley couldn't see the door anywhere, the room so long it seemed more like a corridor now.
    She felt her heart pounding in her chest. Her breath coming a bit heavier.
    Don't panic .
    "Don't panic," she said as if the words spoken aloud could hold off the terror rising around her.
    "PANIC!" Sam screeched.
    Rigley jumped, the sound louder than anything the bird made before. She turned fully to it, and Sam dropped his beak into the skull's flesh beneath him. He tossed it up like a pelican and swallowed the bloody meat in one gulp.
    She backed another step away and quickly glanced down the room.
    Just go, she thought. You'll find the exit .

6
    Present Day
    " T here aren't a lot of options."
    Knox watched as the new President leaned back in his chair. Probably not the one he was used to. Knox doubted anyone had time to gather the chairs from his office and bring them down here before the lava poured down on his furniture.
    "The last plane we sent in dropped from the sky, and clearly bombs don't have an effect," Knox said.
    This President was quieter, different than the now deceased President Hayley.
    "Troops?" Trone said. Albert Trone. What a name.
    "You know what happened the last time, right?"
    Trone nodded.
    "But the ice, that was working, right?"
    Knox nodded. Worked great until the fucking bitch decided to create a traveling volcano. Now, all those men lay under layers of the white cake—if anything remained at all, if the molten core hadn't melted their very teeth.
    "Well, that's where we have to go. We have to figure out a way to use more cold."
    "And what if she brings more of that lava up?"
    "If she brings up anymore, I don't think we'll have to worry about her. The core isn't inexhaustible."
    "True," Knox said, looking away as he thought.
    The problem wasn't that he didn't want men to die. He knew they would die. War's only creation was death, nothing else, and he understood that as well as any man to ever live. The problem was, he didn't want to send them to certain death.
    "What other choice do I have?" he whispered, not realizing he spoke aloud.
    "What?"
    "Nothing," Knox said, snapping his attention back. "We can use ice, but it's going to be tough. It's not winter in Georgia, and if we drop it from a plane, it's going to be water by the time it lands."
    The Vice President ( President, he's the President now ) nodded and kept staring directly at Knox.
    "Then we send troops in, just like we did before, but more of them. The entire military."
    Knox nodded, knowing that was the only thing they could do.
    "We'll have help," Trone said. "I'm about to be on a call with basically the entire UN. We'll have unlimited men once they understand what's happening."
    "Are they going to believe us, about the ice?"
    "If they don't, they'll find out soon when they try some of the things we already have."
    "We're going to allow foreign armies on our soil?" Knox said. It was unheard of, a tactic that third world countries used.
    "There aren't a lot of options," Trone said, repeating Knox's words.
    More truth. Foreign armies on American soil beat annihilation. And that's what they