THE LAST PROTOCOL PROLOGUE

LAST PROTOCOL PROLOGUE

The air in the bunker was frigid, sharp with the sour residue of men who had breathed each other’s fear for too long.
Beyond the reinforced concrete shell, the world was coming apart.
Inside, routine had hardened into ritual. This cathedral of switches and cooling fans was where the end would arrive: as a liturgy.
Lieutenant Samuel Riker’s hands hovered above the console. He studied the grime under his nails, scrubbed raw earlier. The stain remained.
Emergency lights dragged shadows across the room.
Opposite him, Major Elias Thorne wiped sweat from his temple.
Years of drills had worn his face smooth, his expression unreadable. His eyes stayed on the small photograph taped to his computer screen: a golden retriever, tongue lolling, frozen in sunlight. Restless fingers had frayed its edges.
At the centre of the room, a monitor glowed:

Riker fixated on the steady blinking cursor. He saw it as impatient, insisting on an answer. The right answer.
Outside, the world was burning.
“Confirmation received, Major.” Riker forced his voice level. His lungs ached. In his left ear, tinnitus screamed.
Thorne nodded.
His gaze lingered on the dog. He blinked. His attention shifted to the thick plexiglass cover of the sequence panel, clouded with fingerprints from a thousand rehearsals.
Riker read his half of the twelve-digit code. His fingers moved with mechanical precision.
Thorne followed.
The system accepted their input with a soft electronic chime.
Riker drew the heavy chrome key from his breast pocket, its braided steel tether cold against his skin.
Redundancy no longer mattered. The world it had protected was gone.
He slid the key into the right-hand slot.
Thorne mirrored him on the left.
Riker met Thorne’s eyes. The Major didn’t look away. Emptiness lurked there.
“On my mark,” Thorne said. “Three.”
Riker’s breath snagged.
“Two.”
His fingers tightened once, then released.
“One.” He bit the inside of his lip.
“Mark.”
They turned the keys. The clicks landed in perfect unison.
An electric crack split the air.
The console flared from red to searing yellow.
Beneath their boots, the concrete floor trembled, a deep groan of stone flexing and metal tearing far below.
Thorne sagged into his chair.
“It is done.” His voice fractured. Jaw locked. His hands were white on the armrests, a tremor working through his left.
Riker stayed upright as air dragged into his chest, thick and raw.
The grime under his nails was from the morning’s maintenance check.
The checklist remained. The world did not.
His fingers brushed his breast pocket, tracing the outline of a photograph: his wife, his daughter. He did not remove it.
The indicators scrolled:

Riker did not see the lights.
His daughter’s hand slipped from his, too small to hold. His wife stood in the doorway, smiling at them both.
A single tear escaped.
It traced a clean line through the dust on his cheek and struck the console.
The droplet rebounded in the strobe light, blooming into a liquid crown, mushroom-shaped, before collapsing into darkness.
In the silo’s core, the missile’s solid-fuel thrusters ignited.
The vibration surged into a deafening roar, drowning the high-pitched ringing in Riker’s ear.
Warning lights slashed through the room in jagged bands of red and yellow as the missile tore free of its casing and clawed into the sky.
The ringing in his ear surged back, shrieking, as the roar of the engines vanished.
The rumble didn’t fade. It sank into the earth, through bedrock and foundation, settling into the city’s bones like a fever without release.

The emergency strobes flickered and died.
The photographs began to curl in the damp, feeding the first creeping tendrils of mould.
The chrome keys remained, turned hard to the right and fused into the slots.
Dust blanketed everything, denying the rust its colour.
Outside, the fire died, the sky hardened, and the heavy, slow clock of the decades began to tick.

THE LAST PROTOCOL

The Last Protocol is where the story begins.

What followed did not stay contained.

HEAR THE LAST PROTOCOL PROLOGUE