Heaven's Fist Complete 9-Book Series Set

Prologue
Saturday, June 27th.
Oceanside, California.

There had been something very strange about that shooting star the night before, a bizarre, almost artificial feel to it, as if it were a product of complex and expensive special effects and not the gradual progression of a celestial body across the horizon.  Marilyn Gregory took an uncertain step backwards, her back pressing against the cool metal of her sports utility vehicle, a slate gray Honda, the one she’d had her eye on that she and her husband had finally pulled the trigger on last year.  It was their last major decision before his most recent deployment, and she still figured it was an apology of sorts for leaving her, again, with the three kids.
She cocked her head toward the vehicle, listening, drawing her breath into a shallow, nearly inaudible pattern of exhales and inhales, steadying her heart and closing her eyes so she could focus on what she was hearing.
“Mom?” Scott asked, coming around the front of the vehicle.  Her eldest son had just finished his senior year of high school, and when his dad wasn’t around, he was a surrogate guardian to the other two children, especially three-year-old Vera.  “That doesn’t sound like a test.”
It wasn’t a test.  Marilyn had known that the minute the radio had snapped into the familiar series of shrill howls which now continued emanating from the speakers.  It had been a solid twenty seconds, and usually the announcement of the test of the Emergency Broadcast System was made well before this.
“Pack up the tent,” she hissed.  “Grab Keeler and pack up the tent, right now.”
“Mommy?” asked Vera, stepping toward her from the rear of the vehicle.  The angled hatchback of the Honda was elevated already in preparation for the packing they were going to do this morning already.
Marilyn looked over toward her youngest child, her only daughter.  Her “oopsie” as she and Marcus used to call her, but only when she wasn’t in earshot.  Scott was now seventeen, Keeler fifteen, but three years earlier, right when Marilyn was working up the courage to go back to work, along came Vera.
“It’s okay, pumpkin,” she said, lowering herself to her daughter’s level and holding out a hand.  “Climb in the car, okay?  Get in your seat, Scotty will help buckle you up.”
Vera nodded, her eyes bright and wide, her chubby legs moving her backwards, then around to the other side of the car.
Inside the vehicle the radio crackled with static, the muffled grumble of voices undecipherable.  Her heart hammered.  Something had bugged her about those shooting stars, a nagging feeling that just hadn’t gone away. It had crawled up in her chest cavity and set up shop like a squatter inside a foreclosed house.  She’d slept fitfully and restlessly, her mind drifting back to the sight, even as she was half asleep, some strange piece of what she’d seen keeping her more alert than she should have been.
This morning they’d fixed breakfast, simple cold cereal with milk from the cooler, and had just started packing it all up when the radio had cut into static-filled buzzing.  Even the first chirp had snapped her back to brutal reality, taking that small nugget of doubt and growing it into a boulder.
“—move to higher ground,” the voice in the radio said.  “Unknown source… water levels rising…”
“The tent!” she shouted.  “Now!” And with that exclamation, she was in motion, her well-honed mind snapping to attention, filtering out the gibberish and the worry, focusing on what was important.  It was a cast off from the Marines, she decided, a sense of analyzing the situation, isolating the threats, and acting quickly in the face of danger.  Quite suddenly she was certain that there was real danger here.
“We’re working on it, Mom!” Scott shouted as he knelt by one side of the elaborate structure, meticulously peeling apart the metal struts and feeding them through the pockets of the fabric so he could fold the cloth.
Marilyn snapped her head around, left and right, then glared back at the radio.
“This is not a test!” the voice excitedly exclaimed.  “Proceed immediately to higher ground.  An impact of unknown origins has struck in the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of—”
“Just drop it and move!” Marilyn nearly screamed and Keeler whipped his head around, his eyes wide and frightened.  The younger of the two brothers was also the larger of the two, standing a good three inches taller than Scott with broad shoulders and bronze tan skin.  He nodded curtly and darted forward, moving toward the passenger side as his brother dropped his section of tent.
“Strap your sister in,” Marilyn barked as she slammed the rear hatch closed, then moved around the front toward the driver’s seat.  Scott pried open the door and buckled Vera, then slid into the car, moving past her and strapping himself in the back seat next to her.
“Why is Keeler riding shotgun again?” he asked.
“Does it really matter?” Marilyn replied, snappier than she intended.
“What’s happening, Mommy?” Vera asked, her voice narrow and brittle, a thin icicle threatening to crack.
“It’s okay, honey,” Marilyn replied.  “It’s okay.  We’re going to head home.”
“I thought the radio said higher ground,” Scott said quietly.
The engine roared as she started the car and hammered the accelerator with the whine at its apex, throwing the SUV forward and toward the dirt road they had followed into the campsite.  Sirens were in the distance, the faint, but frantic warble of emergency.  Just below and around the high-pitched alert sounds, Marilyn thought she heard something else, a dull, persistent rumble, a rolling roar of disquiet.
She angled the Honda down the slope, turning right along the curving path, then hauled the wheel to the left, pressing further on the accelerator, bringing the vehicle into a far faster speed than she felt comfortable with on the slender dirt path leading out of the campground.  Already nearing the exit, she picked up speed again, but slammed on the brakes as three police cars screamed past the intersection onto pavement, lights flashing and sirens blaring.
“Mom, I don’t like this,” Keeler whispered, saying it softly as if not wanting his brother to hear.
“I don’t think any of us do,” she replied, turning right onto the pavement, sliding neatly between two vehicles, ignoring the blasting horn from the sedan behind her that she’d cut off.  Up ahead she saw the on ramp heading to Interstate 5 and she moved toward it, but already noticed a glut of vehicles heading north, traffic at a complete standstill on the highway northeast of Oceanside.  Out in the flat, without the trees around, she could hear the sound even more clearly than she had before, and she dared a quick glance in the rearview mirror.
She wished she hadn’t.
The Pacific Ocean was a rampaging beast, filling the entire width of the narrow mirror attached to her windshield.  It rose tall and broad, a blue wall of angry, thrashing arms, rearing back as if winding up for some fierce, haymaker punch.  The buildings lining the coast looked like children’s structures of blocks and toys as the water rolled end over end, surging toward the coast of California, angry and roaring, preparing to slap down the people who dared encroach.  The Earth is seventy-five percent water, and as Marilyn looked in the rearview mirror, she thought that just maybe, that percentage was poised to go up.
“Oh my God,” hissed Scott, who had followed the direction of her eyes and twisted, looking out through the back window.
“Don’t look!” she shouted.  “Just… don’t!” Hauling the wheel to the right, she swerved past the on ramp and plunged down a side street, cutting just south of a row of square buildings.  Turning a sharp left at the end of the city block, she punched the accelerator again, the SUV’s engine hitting a fever pitch of mechanical roars.
Behind them, she could hear the massive crash of waves, and she thought she actually felt them in the road under the vehicle.  Cutting diagonally over two more roads, she swerved between another choked row of halted vehicles, scraping the hood of a Jeep as she passed.  The rising curses from the driver went in one ear and out the other as she navigated a sharp spin around the corner of yet another square of concrete and glass.
“Mom, where are we going?  Are we going home?” asked Keeler.
“We’re going home,” she replied quickly.
“It’s getting closer!” Scott shouted, looking back out the window, and his mother looked in her mirror, confirming his report.  Water barreled down onto a row of buildings a long ways behind them, slamming down onto blunt stone structures, splashing aside, but pummeling the entire landscape with tons upon tons of dark ocean.
“We’re almost there,” Marilyn breathed.
“What do we do once we get there?” Keeler nearly yelled.  “Where do we go?”
Marilyn didn’t reply.  It wasn’t that she didn’t want to, she just had to focus, and had to remain confident, to pretend that she wasn’t petrified, that she wasn’t at least eighty percent certain that she and her family were going to be smashed and drowned by a torrent of water within the next thirty minutes.
She almost missed the turn, but slammed on the brakes and ripped the wheel right, her back tires catching on pavement and squealing for a swift second as she brought the Honda around, then barreled toward the entrance of Camp Pendleton.  The main gate loomed before them, concrete structure and pale red roof, but she saw no guards outside.  Turning right, she pressed the SUV over a low curb, slamming the vehicle out onto a secondary parking lot, angling the SUV around a row of buildings.
Above the sound of the vehicle growling, she could hear the rushing crash of nature smashing all that stood before it, the Pacific Ocean, furious and frantic, crawling its way over the flattened landscape of Oceanside, California, clawing further inland.  It would be on top of them in minutes.  She was literally gambling with her and her family’s lives.
But was it really a gamble when the alternative was certain death?
Cutting the SUV between two rows of buildings stacked side-by-side, she glanced up into the sky, hoping that she would see what she wanted to see.
The sky was empty.
Her heart tightened in her chest, but she turned the wheel right, easing harder on the gas, pushing the vehicle around, curling the left edge of the structures, continuing to head east toward the broad canvas of Pendleton’s training area.  Water rushed onward, closing behind them, already swarming over Interstate 5, picking up the cars that had become stacked and stuck on the elevated roadway and sending them tumbling end-over-end from the concrete bridges, pulled under into the foaming, curling surface of the dark water, consuming them like a hungry creature.
Tears stung at the corners of Marilyn’s eyes.  She was going to lose this little bet, she was suddenly certain of that, her home, her life, everything she knew at Pendleton, all of it gone in one swift instant, and she didn’t even know why.  She hadn’t felt an earthquake, not even a tremor.
Just that stupid shooting star.
The SUV slammed and bumped over the uneven terrain as she pressed it onward, grass and packed dirt thumping along the underside of the vehicle.  She was no longer on any kind of road or street, just throttling across desert ground, heading toward a field of solar panels up ahead.
“Mom!” shouted Keeler from the passenger seat, who was leaning close to his window.  “Up there!”
Her heart leaped as she pressed herself forward, hugging the steering wheel, looking up out of the slanted windshield, her nose nearly touching the glass as she did.  It was there.  She saw it.
With a slow, meandering turn, the brushed metal aircraft banked softly right, its massive twin rotors angling within the sockets of its massive wingspan.  The V-24 Osprey Mark II dipped its rounded nose down, lowering itself through the pale air of morning, easing its broad, flat belly toward the dirt and rocks below.  Now that she was closer, Marilyn could see them, the gathering throng of people standing just by the western perimeter of the solar panels. There must have been a dozen of them, waving their hands in the air, beckoning toward the Marine aircraft, begging for rescue.
Rescue had come.
Marilyn twisted the wheel and brought her Honda into a tight left-hand skid, the rear of the vehicle swinging around, kicking dirt and rocks, and even before the vehicle was completely stopped she was unsnapping her seat belt and pushing her way out of the driver’s seat.  Wind bracketed her, clutching at her long, brown hair and snapping it around, fanning it out, plastering it to her smooth face.
“Out, boys, out!” she screamed.  The sound of the water was nearly deafening, almost louder than the turbines of the Osprey.  A second iteration of the infamous Marine flying vehicle, the V-24 was a transport, a thick and blocky fuselage carried almost impossibly by twin wings with vertical take-off and landing rotors that managed to actually lift the sixteen-ton vehicle up into the air.  It touched down fifty yards away, the wheel struts buckling slightly as it landed, the side door swinging open and allowing a frantic rush of people to shove their way inside.
“Come on, Mom!” shouted Scott, taking a few steps toward the aircraft as Marilyn worked her way through the car seat holding Vera.  Waves crashed and slammed, a wall of once blue water pounding down on the entry gate of Camp Pendleton, the place where they’d been just ninety seconds before, crushing onward, smashing homes and offices, mangling the well-manicured lawns of the housing area.  Her fingers scrambled with the seatbelt, trying to disengage the lock, but they were sweating and shaking.
“Just get in the bird!” she screamed at her two sons.  “Get in there now, we’ll be right behind you!”
“Mommy I’m scared!” screamed Vera as the sound of the Osprey rotors and rushing water all became one mindless din of screaming roars.  Finally she got her fingers worked into the clasp, and the belt snapped free.  Hooking her fingers under Vera’s arms, she wrenched her from the back seat, turned and bolted toward the Osprey, which was already slowly lifting off.  The water was rushing closer, and they weren’t going to risk their whole cargo hold over one stupid woman who couldn’t operate a car seat latch.
She could hardly blame them.  Pulling her daughter tight to her body, she ran, her legs moving in ways they hadn’t moved since she was on active duty, trying to pass her latest PT test.  The gray Osprey loomed before her, slowly rising from the desert floor, tilting slightly as it lifted off.  She ran, her lungs aching, her chest burning and she could see Scott and Keeler reaching desperately from the opened cargo area, grasping for her.  Marilyn was there, she was right there, and she did something she would have thought unthinkable, she coiled her arms tight to her, then thrust out, throwing Vera through the air as if she was tossing a football for a trick play end around.  Scott wrapped his thin arms around her and fell back into the body of the aircraft and Marilyn smiled, tears streaming over her cheeks, her whole head filled with the rushing roar of water and VTOL blades, a deafening, sickening noise threatening to overwhelm her senses.
She felt a powerful clasp on her outstretched hand as Keeler lunged from the aircraft, reaching down for her, two rescued women hurling themselves over his legs so he wouldn’t slip out.  Marilyn took three loping strides, then jumped, letting her fourteen-year-old son pull her up from the dirt, into the air, up into the cargo hold, pulling her, hand over hand, her shoulders aching, her head screaming, her mind not able to tell where the water ended and the aircraft began.
Then they were up and moving, they were flying, and she was being pulled deeper into the cargo area. She looked down, seeing her brand-new Honda SUV swarmed by water, picked up, tossed, dragged under, then it vanished and she never saw it again.
“Dammit, I loved that car.”
The V-24 rose up into the sky and she fell backwards, her vision swirling into a roiling darkness.