Chapter 14 - The Ghost in the Pines
Lily stopped dead in her tracks in the middle of the muddy clearing, the rain soaking through her pink pastel hoodie in seconds. Her breath caught in her throat, her eyes widening in sheer, disbelieving shock as she stared at the figure stepping out from beneath the canopy of pine trees.
It was a tall man in a standard US Army camouflage uniform, with short brown hair and a familiar, weary posture. A jagged dark bruise ran down his jawline, and his left arm was cradled tightly in a sling of white medical gauze.
"Dad?" Lily breathed, her voice a fragile, broken whisper.
Staff Sergeant Gordon dropped the wool blanket, his eyes filling with tears as he opened his good arm wide. "Hey, sweet girl. I told you I'd meet you at the extraction point."
Lily didn't care about the mud, the rain, or the armed soldiers watching them. She broke into a dead sprint, throwing herself forward with every ounce of strength she had left, and slammed straight into her father’s chest. Gordon caught her fiercely, burying his face in her blonde pigtails as a ragged sob broke from his throat.
"You're alive," Lily wept, clinging to his uniform so tightly her fingers ached. "The bad man shot you! I saw you fall!"
"Body armor, Lily. Standard issue, thankfully," Gordon murmured into her hair, his chin trembling as he looked up at Colonel Vance and Marcus walking up behind them. "Though it cracked three ribs and feels like a truck hit me."
Colonel Vance offered a rare, approving nod, tapping her briefcase. "Your diversion worked, Sergeant. The federal hit squad is currently tearing apart an empty sector twenty miles north while our people secure the analog broadcast transmission."
"What broadcast?" Lily asked, pulling back just enough to look up into her father’s bruised face, confusion and hope warring in her eyes.
"The truth, Lily," Gordon said softly, crouching down so he was eye-level with her once more. "Every file, every record, every lie they tried to bury about the water supply and the contamination—it's being uploaded right now to every independent news network in the country through an analog line they can't jam or erase."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, familiar pink hair ribbon that Lily had lost during her math class earlier that morning, tying it gently back into her frayed pigtails.
"You carried the hardest part, Lily. You were braver than any soldier in my unit."
May you like
Before Lily could answer, a blinding flash of light erupted from the horizon behind them, followed by a dull, rumbling shockwave that shook the ground beneath their boots. Far across the valley, a massive pillar of fire rose into the stormy night sky, illuminating the clouds in a brilliant, fiery orange glow that marked the permanent destruction of the federal tracking facility.
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