Apocalypse Days: I Rule with Foresight and a Powerful Son
Chapter 178

Chapter 178: 178

The hum of the overhead lights buzzed like static in Winter’s skull. The antiseptic sting of the medbay still clung to his jacket, clashing with the reek of blood and smoke embedded in the fabric.

He sat on the edge of the cot, elbows on his knees, fingers laced tight enough to blanch his knuckles. He hadn’t spoken since the debrief. The red light on the recorder had gone dark twenty minutes ago, but he hadn’t moved.

His rifle lay in pieces on the floor beside him, uncleaned. The chamber smelled of oil and blood.

Harlow was asleep two beds over — or sedated. Ima also hadn’t spoken in thirty minutes.

She’d been pacing, a jagged, clockwork rhythm across the tile that was starting to wear into Winter’s nerves. Her hands kept flexing open and closed at her sides. She hadn’t changed out of her soaked gear either.

The door hissed open.

Winter didn’t lift his head. Only one person had access to them here.

"Bale," he muttered.

The man stepped in, tablet under one arm, the other hand in his coat pocket.

"I thought you said it would be bad if you were seen with us," Winter said flatly.

"It still is," Bale replied. His voice was tired, but alert. Always alert. "I came to tell you what we found."

Ima stopped pacing.

Winter finally looked up.

Bale nodded once and pulled the chair from the wall.

"As expected, command is in an uproar. No one’s cleared the eastern access tunnel yet," he began. "Collapsed past the midpoint. Structural scans are still pinging movement, but nothing we can verify. It’s sealed."

"Richard?" Winter asked, quiet.

"No sign. Not dead, not confirmed alive. Just gone."

Winter stared at the wall. His fingers tightened again. He didn’t respond.

Bale pressed on. "Nile’s signal blipped near the service lift at 02:03. After that, silence. We found drag marks. No blood. No bullet casings. Nothing human."

"Taken," Winter muttered.

"We don’t know that."

"Yes, we do."

A long silence passed. Ima returned to pacing.

"Marcus?" she asked.

Bale’s expression shifted.

"We tracked his chip briefly. He didn’t leave the quadrant. The signal dropped at 02:06. We found a small blood smear near the airlock chamber. Non-fatal. No sign of a body."

"Which means what?" Ima snapped. "He’s alive? Dead? Half of him stuffed in a barrel somewhere?"

"I don’t speculate without evidence."

"Then what steps do we take now?" Winter asked. "Because none of us were prepared for this."

Bale held his gaze. "You were warned."

"That wasn’t a warning," Winter hissed. "That was a riddle in a coffee mug. ’Don’t speak to it’? We didn’t even get the chance."

Bale didn’t sit. He grabbed the tablet from the floor, swiped through the security footage one last time, jaw locked, then snapped it shut with a brutal slap of frustration.

"Off the record," he growled. "What the hell happened out there?"

Winter stood, his stance stiff, eyes dull and unfocused under the sterile light. "What the official debrief left out? All of it."

"The subject was awake and already out of its confinement pod. It seemed more curious than aggressive in a weird sense. That didn’t make it any less dangerous. There were some unknown people there who weren’t factored into the plan."

There was another long pause.

Bale set the tablet down and finally spoke with something close to rage.

"Now I can see why the subject was classified. To think once again, that I’m being left out in the creation of something so powerful, right under my fucking nose."

Winter snorted. "All due respect, the classification was pointless. It knew us. It spoke like us. It was us."

Ima stopped. "It mimicked Richard’s voice. Before we even saw it."

Bale looked shocked. "It might have been Richard, the chaos could confuse anyone."

"You don’t understand," Winter said, more quietly. "It wanted us to see it. Like it was practicing."

Bale exhaled, slowly, rubbing his temples. "There’s no record of a Subject Seventeen. Command denied any live transport ops in the sector that night. Nothing on the grid. No authorizations. Officially, it doesn’t exist."

Winter snorted. Of course it didn’t.

He looked up again, eyes sharp. "They’re lying. I didn’t push. Didn’t ask questions. If they suspected I knew, they’d bury me with the rest of it."

Ima moved toward the console in the corner and tapped through to the map logs. Her voice was calm, but her fingers trembled. "Then how did we end up intercepting it? And who were those third party?"

She turned the screen. "This convoy route? Doesn’t exist in any open record. Only redacted logs—the ones you decrypted."

Bale stared at the screen. His pulse ticked visibly in his jaw.

"So who the hell dropped that flash in that lab for us to find?"

So many questions, so little answers. Winter missed the time when their biggest mystery had been out to get the orb away from the earth’s atmosphere and stop the apocalypse.

Fuck, Zara was going to be so pissed when he got back to their spot.

Suddenly a wave of guilt washed over him.

Winter rubbed his jaw, fingers lingering over the scrape beneath his cheekbone. "I spoke to it," he said at last. "It knew my name."

"You didn’t know," Ima offered, but it sounded more like an excuse than comfort.

"I should’ve." His voice was low, rough. "I should’ve known it wasn’t him."

"If it can mimic — really mimic — then we can’t trust anything we saw in that tunnel," Ima said. Her voice was quiet but razor-sharp. "Not the screams. Not the faces. Not the orders."

Bale looked up sharply at that, something cold settling in his gaze.

"You think we were manipulated," he said.

"I think we were studied," Ima replied. "It wanted to see how far it could push us."

The medbay’s lights buzzed louder in the pause that followed. Bale didn’t interrupt.

From the far cot, Harlow stirred. His voice was barely audible. "He gave the order," he murmured. "You followed it."

Winter turned slightly, as if unsure he’d really heard him. Harlow’s eyes were open now — bloodshot, distant, but lucid. "Don’t forget that part," he added.

Winter exhaled, slow and hard, like it burned on the way out.

"We didn’t see them fall," Ima said suddenly, her voice cutting clean through the guilt that hung over them. "We don’t know anything for sure."

"No," Bale said, "we don’t."

But the look in his eyes said he feared they soon would.

He turned toward the corner console where the decrypted convoy data still blinked on screen, lines of corrupted code threading down like a digital rain. "I want everything from the uplink before it cut. Audio, thermal, comm lag. Run it again. Filter for any voice anomalies."

"You think it’s still out there," Ima said, not quite asking.

"I think we never understood what we were sent to intercept," Bale replied grimly. "And until we do, we stay here. We don’t talk to anyone outside this wing. No reports, no rumors, no names."

"Command’ll lose their shit," Harlow croaked.

"They already have," Bale said, tapping his temple. "They’re just pretending they haven’t."

"We might have made a mistake in haste."

Bale’s fists clenched at those words. As a senior commanding officer, knowing your men were dead or worse under your command was a terrible feeling. "We have one window," he said, his voice lower.