The Milestone Protocol by Ernest Dempsey (reading in the dark txt) 📗

continuing the leader’s momentum his face smacked into a whirling elbow.

The leader’s nose crunched, and the blow knocked him off his feet. He landed on his back, dazed from the hard landing and the blinding pain resonating from his broken nose. Blood oozed from his nostrils.

Kevin stared at the man on the ground. He couldn’t tear his eyes away, and he noticed something on the man’s neck, just below the ear. It was a tattoo. Kevin frowned at the sight.

He didn’t have time to think about it.

The stranger straddled the leader, scooped up the knife from his limp fingers, and pressed the edge against the man’s neck.

“Who sent you?” the blond asked.

The leader merely laughed in answer.

“Who sent you? Who do you work for?”

The blond pushed the sharp edge deeper into the skin. Blood oozed from the slim wound.

The leader grinned fiendishly back up at the blond. “Do you think I fear death? My cause is greater than any life, including my own.”

“Cause? What cause?” The blond sneered the words.

“You shall see soon enough.”

Then the leader raised his head and jerked it to the side, slicing his own neck against the knife.

The blond reared back as blood spurted from the man’s neck. All the newcomer could do was watch as the leader’s body convulsed for nearly half a minute, then gradually slowed until it was motionless.

The blond wiped off the handle of the knife with his blue Jimmy Eat World zip-up hoodie and dropped the weapon onto the leader’s chest.

He looked to Kevin, who stood frozen, leaning against the dumpster.

The blond peered into Kevin’s fear-filled eyes with unyielding steel.

“Dr. Kevin Clark?” he asked, his voice sprinkled with a Southern accent.

Kevin swallowed back his emotions and the disbelief of what he’d just seen. The four men were dead. They were going to kill him. And this man, this blond American, had saved his life.

“Yes,” he managed, stumbling over his response. “I’m Kevin Clark.”

The blond nodded at him politely, but with a grim expression. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Clark. I’m Sean Wyatt.”

5 Atlanta

Tara Watson peered into the glass case with wide eyes, amazed at how the sliver reacted to electricity, changes in air pressure, even light and darkness.

Her husband, Alex Simms, stared on in disapproval, constantly looking back over his shoulder for fear that their boss, Tommy, would show up at any given second.

“I still can’t believe you managed to find that, bring it back to the States, and now have the gall to use the IAA lab to run tests on it.” His fear-filled voice echoed the paranoia coursing through his mind.

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t exactly sure if I should tell Tommy I snuck a piece of Quantium out of Bolivia.” She never looked away from the screen as the data continued to pile up. “This material is pretty incredible.”

Alex crossed his arms. He stood behind her, watching the computer monitor between over-the-shoulder glances at the windows separating the lab from the hallway beyond.

“I know. I’m just saying, maybe we should have let him in on it. You know? Told our boss who has pretty much given us our dream jobs that we smuggled an extremely rare element into his lab? It did blow up an ancient stone gate down in Bolivia. Remember?”

How could I forget? Tara kept the thought to herself, along with all the others she’d had since that fateful day at the site known as the Sun Gate.

They’d been sent on a mission for their newly formed Paranormal Archaeology Division to investigate a series of bizarre thefts. What they’d uncovered was a scheme by a man who called himself Buri, the head of an underground cabal looking to discover ancient portals into other dimensions, or perhaps even cross the bounds of time itself.

In the end, Alex and Tara—along with some help from their new friends Dak Harper and Boston McClaren—stopped Buri from entering the portal and managed to destroy the ancient ruins, rendering the gate and the powerful blue stones known as Quantium to nothing but rubble. Moments before the explosion, though, Tara saw into the portal. She felt the power of the stone she’d held in her hand as it resonated, vibrated, pulsed against her skin. Even now, as she ran tests through the only surviving piece from the incident, she could feel a strange connection to it, as if it called to her.

She’d seen things in those brief seconds on the portal’s threshold—wild, dreamlike visions—that she couldn’t always clearly recall, but that remained in her memory like some hazy nightmare. Not all of what she’d seen was bad. Some of it even appeared to be good, like pieces of an unknown history playing out before her eyes as though in a movie.

Scenes of battles played out in her mind. Some pitted ancient warriors against each other. She witnessed bloody fighting down through the ages, up to recent conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world.

Tara also witnessed human suffering due to disease and pestilence. People dying on beds in mud huts, in hospital beds, in huge warehouses.

At the time, Tara didn’t understand the flashes of madness that darted through her mind’s eye. She didn’t grasp what she was seeing or why. She’d have been lying if she said it hadn’t changed her, and Tara knew Alex had noticed.

It took considerable effort to act normal after coming back from Bolivia. She’d gone out of her way to smile more, to pretend that nothing was bothering her, but no matter what she did, Tara couldn’t shake the feeling deep down inside.

Something terrible was coming.

She had no idea why, but she sensed humanity was in grave danger.

As the events of the global pandemic played out, she wondered if that was it, if that had been the cause of her anxiety, her strange visions from the past. That’s all it was, she told herself. Nothing but a little paranoia brought on by a traumatic event.

Still, Tara wasn’t certain, and dread continued to plague her thoughts