Shock (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

illegal.
    He moved out of his friends’ garage, got himself a small flat in Clapham. Nothing too expensive. John expected that at any moment his luck would run out, and Fred would decide that two hundred grand a year was way more than he needed to spend on a driver-cum-bodyguard.
    Days progressed, a nd John felt his guard slipping, even starting to allow himself to believe that this might be real, that maybe he just had been that lucky: an isolated act of heroism rewarded with a genuine shot at a decent life.
    The feeling remained right up until late one night, when Fred emerged from his office at a pace that belied his age, and gasped his orders to John.
    “The airport. It’s starting tonight. Go, GO!”
    John had known that Fred’s business was gearing up for something big. Some merger probably, just another shifting of zeroes on some balance sheet somewhere that would increase the old man’s wealth exponentially.
    It was only when he reached the small, private airfield in Kent as the sun disappeared beyond the horizon that he realised he had become a part of something much bigger.
    The airfield was packed with limousines and eye-wateringly expensive sports cars: John saw a couple of Ferrari’s, a Lamborghini and other exotic machines standing out among the Audi’s and the Mercedes’.
    Beyond the fantasy car park, there stood a sight even more perplexing: t here were as many as twenty large helicopters waiting, engines howling, rotors spinning. All around there was activity: perfectly groomed men in expensive suits and diamond-studded women, some dragging children, running from one form of transportation to the next. Along with them, John saw a hundred reflections of himself: men, some armed, some not, escorting their employers onto the choppers. All of them stank of the military, enough that John almost felt for a moment like he was back in the army, on some mission to escort VIP’s to some safe zone.
    Behind him, Fred leapt out of the limo, and gave as close an approximation of a sprint as his ancient knees would allow. John trotted after him, reaching the large black chopper as Fred boarded. This was no civilian chopper, John realised as he approached. Not quite the latest military hardware, but a gunship nonetheless. What the fuck…?
    “Get aboard John, this is it!” Fred cried out, and John heard something in the old man’s voice, something that made him forget everything else. Like rats , John thought, if you discover the rich running from something, the only sensible course of action is to run with them.
    Only as the chopper lifted from the ground, soaring above London, part of a strange metallic flock, did John identify what he had heard in the old man’ s tone. A sort of childlike excitement yes, but also something else, bubbling away under the surface.
    Panic.
     
     
    *
     
     
    The t hree men stood in the small gym, staring at the locked door. John put his ear to it; heard nothing in the space beyond.
    “We should just get out of here,” Ash said, “back to the chopper. This situation is FUBAR. There’s nothing for us here.” He shot a pleading look at Jeff.
    Ash, John realised, was stuck in the same predicament as their Captain: both believed they were still members of some mighty military machine. But that machine had collapsed when all the methods of communication on which humanity had relied had crashed – or had been crashed, rather – simultaneously.
    John only had sketchy details, of course; he was just a grunt. Across the course of his career in the forces he had found himself promoted to a position where he controlled other grunts, but he had been under no illusion: there would always be someone above him, someone whose tune he would have to march to, no matter how r idiculous.
    Still, the sketchy details were enough. The idiots at the base had changed the world irrevocably, and now that the proverbial shit had hit the fan, they had discovered that they needed the aid of a man that