The Omega Protocol Chronicles (Book 1): Exodus by Courtney McPhail Read Free Book Online

walked the rest of the way down the trail to join them on the deck. The wooden platform had been constructed on a craggy outcropping of the hill and she knew that in the daylight it would offer a wide vista of the valley below.  
    She smiled, trying to feign innocence as she held up the food and water. “I figured you might be hungry.”
    Malcolm took the offered food with a smile. “Thank you, Kim. I appreciate you thinking of us.”
    She hadn’t noticed the smoky quality of his voice before and a tingle of awareness shot up her spine. The dimple in his right cheek that gave his face a boyish charm had also gone unnoticed but she was noticing it now. Same with the fullness of his lips and the dark ring of lashes around his soft brown eyes. And it hit her suddenly: Malcolm was a very attractive man.
    What a strange thought to take over her brain at the moment. Maybe her mind was finally breaking after all the trauma. Or, more likely, it was desperately trying to focus on something trivial and meaningless instead of the dire situation reality was presenting. She forced herself to look away from Malcolm, focusing on handing Janet her share of the food.
    “Thank you.” Janet cracked open the bottle and took a long swallow. “So, how much did you hear?”
    Kim blushed at being called out on her eavesdropping but at the same time she was relieved to have something to focus her brain on instead of mentally undressing Malcolm.
    “I didn’t mean to listen in but I couldn’t help it,” she tried to explain. “I heard you say that you’re going somewhere and you’re going to give us the choice to come with you. So where are you going?”
    “A little island in the Great Lakes, it’s a safe haven of sorts,” Malcolm replied. “The CIA has always been good at having plans in place for every kind of situation. The one for the collapse of civilization happens to include meeting up north on the island.”
    “And they call this plan Omega.” The pieces were starting to fall into place. “What do you do once you make it to the island?”
    “Try to put things back to rights.” He shrugged as if it was a simple task. Maybe to him it did seem a simple task. After all, he’d obviously been trained for this.
    “So it’s the undisclosed location that they whisked the President off to?”
    “No. If the President or any of his successors are alive, they’ll be in the NORAD bunker in Colorado. What’s left of the military leadership will be there too. They’ll be focusing their time and energy on mounting some sort of control on a national level. I don’t know if that’s possible if the Omega Protocol was initiated.”
    “What is it exactly?”
    “Omega was designed as a final Hail Mary. Those who were told about it were handpicked by Samuel Sheppard, the Director of the CIA. He assembled a group that would have the best chance of accomplishing what he intended: starting civilization over again.”
    “It’s not meant for just when the government loses control. It’s meant for when civilization itself collapses. We used to call it the End of Days Protocol as a joke. Guess it doesn’t seem so funny now.”
    She looked at him, the heavy set of his shoulders, the crease of his brow and his sad eyes told her he was speaking the truth.
    “I was going to tell everyone in the morning. Give them the option to come with us. It’s going to be a long trip so we’ll need to stock up on supplies before we head out. There’s a CIA safe house in Shenandoah. We’ll hold up there for a while before we head north.”
    “So that’s about it. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what you want to do. You can come with us as far as you want or strike out on your own. It’s up to you.”
    Well, he’d painted quite a grim picture but it wasn’t any worse than what she saw tonight.
    She walked over to the edge of the platform and the only light she could make out came from the highway winding like a snake in the distance. The line