Terror Rising: Book 0 – The Insurgence (19 page)

“Okay, I’m on,” Drake said. “Yeah. Some kind
of live leak site. It’s loading…” He froze as his eyes locked on
the screen. “Oh my God…”

Angela couldn’t take the suspense. She stood
up and walked around the desk to see what all the commotion was
about. The phone fell from Drake’s shoulder as he stared at the
screen, petrified.

“Chief? What is it?” Angela asked.

He tried to answer her, but seemed to be in
a state of shock. “Terror cell. ISIS video. It’s real-time shit
here.”

Angela walked behind his chair and squinted
her eyes to see the screen as her heart seized with fear. There was
streaming video of a person on their knees in an orange jumpsuit
with a burlap sack over their head. Standing behind them was a man
with a tan face mask, eye slits, and an ammo vest over his
camouflaged clothing. Behind him hung the black flag of ISIS
mounted on the wall.

The masked man then spoke with a muffled
British accent.

“Americans… today is the
day of your reckoning. We are on you streets. We are in your
neighborhoods, and we will only attack if provoked. Today, you
provoked us. You killed our brothers. Attacked our home.
Slaughtered us like animals. And now we must strike
back.”

The man stepped forward and pulled off the
hood of the person in the center of the first group. Angela grew
dizzy as the room began to spin around. It felt like a dream or
some kind of out of body experience. The exposed man looked eerily
like her husband, Doug. But his normally neat hair was all messed
up, and besides, it couldn’t possibly have been Doug.

“We have the family of one
your agents,”
the masked man said, pulling
his captive’s head by the hair and holding the knife to his
throat.

He then pointed at the camera with his
gloved hand. “You have twenty-four hours to meet our demands, or we
will kill Doug Gannon and his two daughters.”

Chief Drake whipped his head around to see
Angela quickly losing color in her face with tears already
streaming down her cheeks. She couldn’t breathe. She grabbed the
side of his chair as her vision became more blurry.

Drake jolted up from his seat. “Angela!”

For Angela, the room went black, and before
he could catch her, she was on the floor, briefly safe from the new
nightmare that was now her world.