Brady's focus returned to his mission. They'd identified a small town where the soldiers in Western uniforms had holed themselves. He had no idea who they were, except that sightings of them became regular soon after the nuke attacks on the East Coast.
"I said, security to command! You surface dwellers better not be sleeping, or-"
In the quite, dark command center, Lana awoke from her doze with a jerk at the peeved female's voice, the dream of her journey to the Peak fading. She slapped the pad to open the command center's internal network. The communications screen lit up one wall, displaying one of the genetically altered women in the elite special operations security team. Unlike the regular military, the political elite's security private forces were made up of children from the upper class to prevent the elite class from becoming polluted by the poor.
The muscular woman, with short blond hair and clad in black tactical gear, stood in a stark white hallway. Green eyes sparkled despite her irritated tone.
"I'm here, I'm here, Elise," Lana mumbled.
"Lana!" Elise's voice brightened. "I'm happy it's you. Greenie got you working nights, too?"
"Yes. Everything okay?"
"Just bored."
Lana's body ached from sleeping in chairs. She shook her head to clear it and looked around. The command hub held a dozen workstations, one for each eastern critical infrastructure, and a wall secured behind titanium glass of keypads, buttons, and computer screens that acted as the emergency backup. The Eastern Command Center had served as the headquarters for the Eastern armies during the East-West Civil War. After the war, it remained a central hub.
The other walls of the octagon-shaped command center were occupied by silent, animated screens similar to the one the underground security commander appeared on. Computers hummed, the sound enough to lull Lana to sleep nearly every shift she spent alone in the vault despite the sleep replacement supplements-known as anti-sleepers-she took.
She paced in front of one wall, staring again at the map of the eastern U.S., where the attacks and their kill zones were marked with a running timeline beneath it. The major cities in the East hit by nukes were marked in red with concentric circles that faded to orange, yellow, and finally green as they stretched west. With the exception of a few isolated pockets of green, most of the East Coast was shaded with red, orange, or yellow, while the Midwest was a mix of greens and yellows.
"You're obsessed," Elise said. "What is it now?"