THE LAST SIGNAL: I Hold the Reset

The last radio tower in North America was screaming static.

Captain Ryker Hale pressed his back against the concrete and listened to it. Every channel carried the same dead hiss. Below him, Denver burned.

"Captain, they're through the east gate!" Corporal Pike's voice cracked. "There's too many. Sir."

"I know."

He had known for six hours. He had known for eight years, if he was honest. He had stood in a room once and told them exactly what would come, and they had smiled at him and stamped his file unfit.

The wall behind him shook. Something enormous was climbing the tower from outside, claws scraping steel like a cathedral bell dragged through gravel.

"Pike," Ryker said. "Burn the transmitter."

"But the signal—"

"There's nobody left to hear it."

Pike stared at him, young and soot-black and terrified. Then he nodded and went to work. Ryker checked his rifle. Four rounds. He almost laughed.

The roof peeled open like a tin can.

A shape rose against the red sky, long-limbed, glistening, too many joints in all the wrong places. Pike screamed once and then wasn't screaming anymore.

Ryker fired. Four rounds, four hits, and the thing didn't even slow.

It leaned down until its face was inches from his. Beneath the teeth and the wet dark eyes, he saw something that made his blood go cold.

It was smiling. Not like an animal. Like a man who had waited a long time for this.

"Hello, Captain," it said, in the voice of General Marcus Doyle.

The man who had signed the order dismissing him.

Then the claws came down, and everything went white.

[Reset Protocol engaged.]

Ryker gasped, and air filled his lungs. Real air, clean and cold and smelling of floor polish and stale coffee.

His hands gripped a polished table. Around him, a dozen officers in crisp uniforms were staring at him.

No.

He knew this room. He knew the flag in the corner, the cracked ceiling tile above the projector, the exact way the light fell across General Doyle's face at the head of the table.

"Captain Hale?" Doyle's voice was patient, almost kind. "You were saying?"

Eight years. He was eight years in the past.

[Host: Ryker Hale. Combat System: ONLINE. Warnings remaining: 3.]

The words burned across his vision in pale blue light. A small counter pulsed in the corner of his sight: 3.

Ryker's pulse hammered. Slowly, carefully, he looked at the man at the head of the table, the man who had worn that smile on a monster's face.

Doyle smiled back.

He doesn't know I remember.

"I was saying," Ryker said, and his own voice surprised him with how steady it was, "that the threat is real, and it's already inside this room."

Nervous laughter rippled around the table. Someone coughed. Doyle's smile didn't move.

[System Notice: Three entities in this room are not human. Scanning...]

Ryker kept his face perfectly still, and his hand slid beneath the table.

[Warning 1 available. Use now?]

He watched the counter. He watched the general's calm eyes. He thought of Pike, of Denver, of every voice that had gone silent on the dead channels.

Not yet.

I'll choose who falls first.