The Remaining: Trust: A Novella by D. J. Molles Page B

That would be it. Project Hometown would do what it was meant to do. He could only assume that the other forty-seven Coordinators had not received communications from Frank either and would also be opening their boxes at their respective forty-eight-hour marks.
    The thought of it scared him shitless.
    He drank the dregs of his coffee, grabbed a water bottle, and sat down on the couch, facing the gigantic TV. He turned it on and scanned through the cable channels. TV had gone much sooner than the Internet news. Most channels had been displaying an emergency broadcast screen with a ticker at the bottom looping the same information: the major metropolitan areas that were under evacuation order and which FEMA shelter to report to for each area.
    Now the channels displayed blank blue screens.
    Lee sank back onto the couch and stared, unsure of what he was waiting for. Perhaps for the channels to start transmitting again. Perhaps for his computer to chime, informing him that Frank was on the other line. Maybe he was just waiting to wake up from a bad dream.
    The blue screen staring back at him felt surreal. He shook his head. Frank would call. He had to call. A virus couldn’t knock out the United States government. There were scientists, whole departments whose sole purpose for existing was to identify and eliminate these types of threats before they even became a problem. He wondered fleetingly if this were a joke, but dismissed it. Colonel Frank Reid would never play that tasteless of a joke. Lee didn’t even think Frank would play any joke at all.
    He didn’t strike Lee as the joking type.
    Something was keeping him from calling. The Internet signal could have been damaged or destroyed where Frank was, causing him to be unable to contact Lee for the past two days. Techs would be working overtime to reestablish contact with the Coordinators so Frank could tell them to hold off on reading their mission packets.
    In the meantime, Lee had no idea what to do with himself. He would usually busy himself with a book or a movie, but watching a movie seemed inappropriate and he would not be able to focus on reading a book with his mind running through scenarios of what the hell was happening in the world outside his bunker.
    He drank the rest of his water bottle and went to his treadmill. He left the incline flat and brought it up to an eight-minute-mile pace. He needed to waste some time and planned on running for a while.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by D.J. Molles
Excerpt from The Remaining copyright © 2012 by D.J. Molles
Cover design by Lauren Panepinto, cover photo by Arcangel Images.
Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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