Page 31 of Trigger Discipline
Blake didn’t have an answer to that.
“Even an EMP pulse would only destroy things inside the pulse. Their radios weren’t here when everything short-circuited. So why aren’t they working?”Tommy asked.
“Stop asking me questions I clearly don’t have the answer to,” Blake snapped, drawing Gabriel’s attention.
“I don’t have the answers either! I’m just saying there’s something else going on. There’s a reason we haven’t launched a full scale attack yet.”Tommy whisper yelled, throwing his hands in the air.
“Either way,” Judd said, tossing the marker to the floor. “We need to establish contact. With permission, I’m going to try and set up the telegraph.”
“I’ll help,” Tommy offered
They disappeared into the Captain’s office to work on this harebrained scheme Blake came up with on a fucking whim. God. They didn’t even know what they were doing. Rubbing his face, he flopped back onto the couch, breathing hard.
Gabriel’s fingers carded through his hair, gently tugginghis face out of his hands to look up at him. Looming over him, Gabriel’s smile was faint and reassuring.
“You really saved our asses. Both of you.”
Blake thought back to Tommy’s pale face as they drove through the burning streets and the singed ends of his hair.“Tommyneeds to leave. Evacuate or whatever.”
“If we get some communication up and running, we can request a helo. Get all of us out of here.”
“What about your mission?”
Gabriel’s fingers stilled in his hair; nails buried in his scalp in a way that was uncomfortably comfortable. Tiny pinpricks of pain he could lean into. Something flickered across his face.
“Mission is unchanged,” he said gruffly. “Establish communications and perform reconnaissance. Saving civilians is part of my job.”
Blake couldn’t nod, so he just looked up at Gabriel. Even from this angle he was striking. Maybe not in a Hollywood kind of way, but in a calm and competent kind of way. The way he assessed situations allowed his men free rein as long as they came back when he called. Confident and not showy.
Blake liked it.
Admitting that felt like a rubber band snapping in his chest, and the rush of emotions was too much this time. Gabriel was cool and competent, and Blake was barely holding it together.
Saving civilians is part of my job.
It was Blake’s too, and look where he was? Hiding in the station while people died. That man burned alive from the inside, right in Blake’s hands and he couldn’t do jack shit to save him. He couldn’t even help people evacuate because he didn’t know about it.
He knocked Gabriel’s hand from his hair and stood. Trying to straighten the tangled locks, he mumbled something—he wasn’t sure what—and stepped out of the livingroom. He didn’t have a destination in mind until he was unlocking the back door and breathing in the sunshine.
Such a beautiful day was uncalled for.
The back porch was really just a cracked cement slab stuck out into a weedy courtyard. One of the firefighters had a grill out there, and they sometimes were able to grill when there weren’t too many calls. Surrounded by a tall privacy fence, at some point it probably had been nice.
Crabgrass clung to the thin dirt. Little prickly assholes that were as ugly as they were stubborn. Blake slid down the brick wall, hitting the cool cement and slumping backward. Grit crunched behind his head as he looked up at the roof.
Calling it a roof was generous. It was one of those weird coverings that looked like lattice. Like the top of an apple pie. Which didn’t make any sense because isn’t the job of a roof tocoverthings? Sun and rain could fall through this thing. There was no protection.
Not that a sturdy roof counted for anything when it really mattered. Not when the whole world was ending.
That hit Blake like a freight train. Or a loose tire. He’d been so busy worrying about Tommy, his parents, and the rest that he hadn’t really considered it all.
Aliens.
What the absolute fuck was going on?
Blake wasn’t a biologist or whoever the hell studiedE.T. He couldn’t even begin to fathom why the hell the aliens were here. Hell, he could barely process the fact that his entire life had changed in the span of forty-eight hours.
He closed his eyes and tried not to float away. It was petty and selfish, he knew, but thinking of thebig picturewas too big. Too scary and vacant. He couldn’t process how many people had died. Or that the US government had been fucked to hell. He had always assumed the government would destroy itself from the inside, self-implode in a flurry ofconceited money grubbers hiding behind good guy smiles and fake concern for the little guy.