The Project Eden Thrillers Box Set 1: Books 1 - 3 (Sick, Exit 9, & Pale Horse)

by Brett Battles

  WHITE HOUSE BRIEFING ROOM FEED

  CARRIED LIVE ON ALL MAJOR BROADCAST AND CABLE NETWORKS WORLDWIDE

  1:20 PM EASTERN STANDARD TIME

  LOWER THIRD GRAPHIC over man walking to podium:

  WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY LIONEL SCHULTZ

  SCHULTZ: I have a brief statement, and will be taking no questions after.

  (Groans from crowd, and shouts of complaint.)

  SCHULTZ: Please, settle down.

  (Noise diminishes, but crowd restless.)

  SCHULTZ (reading from sheet of paper): Progress has been made in identifying the nature of the threat to our nation and our friends around the world, and steps are being taken to mitigate the problem.

  PAUL LUNDEN, REPORTER, ABC NEWS: What steps?

  SHEILA BLACK, REPORTER, ASSOCIATED PRESS: What’s the nature?

  SCHULTZ (still reading): The president has been apprised of every new development, and remains focused on dealing with this issue head-on. At two p.m. eastern time, he will address the nation.

  MARY WHITMORE, REPORTER, BBC: Will he be in here?

  KYLE NORRIS, REPORTER, PCN: Will he be taking questions?

  SCHULTZ (looking at the press pool): The president will be addressing the nation from the Oval Office, and no, there will be no questions. Thank you.

  (As Schultz heads off stage, pandemonium breaks out.)

  TRANSCRIPT

  PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS

  2:03 PM EASTERN STANDARD TIME

  MY FELLOW AMERICANS and citizens in nations throughout the world, over the last day and a half, we have all watched as signs of what we now know is a massive, unprecedented terrorist attack have appeared. The shipping containers we have seen on our televisions have been found in hundreds of cities around the globe. We have been working in conjunction with other governments to 1) determine exactly what the threat is, and 2) figure out how it can be stopped.

  I wish I could bring you better news. Scientists working at both the US Army Medical Research Institute and the Centers for Disease Control have been able to isolate the bio-agent and identify it. With the exception of a few minor variations, it resembles the Sage Flu virus that devastated the Mojave Desert area of California last spring, and caused a minor outbreak in St. Louis less than a week ago. It is believed that while quarantine measures have helped isolate many of these viral bombs, enough of the virus has already been released to cause catastrophic problems.

  As you know, moving the containers has not worked, nor have attempts to disassemble them. We had hoped to destroy them, and, in fact, tried to do just that several hours ago. Unfortunately, much of the virus was not destroyed, and instead was carried off in the wind.

  We continue to try to find methods of shutting the containers off, but I will not lie to you. We believe it will be too little, too late.

  Because of this, I have ordered a complete shutdown of all nonessential government agencies, and all private and public businesses. I’ve also just signed an executive order declaring a nationwide state of emergency and instituting a twenty-four-hour curfew. Military personnel will be joining local law enforcement to see that everyone remains safe.

  Contact with people outside your home should be avoided. To that end, we ask that you all go home, seal your windows and doors, and remain there until it can be determined that it’s okay to go outside again.

  We continue working on solving this crisis. Once we do, we will then focus on bringing to justice those responsible.

  Until that time, may God save us all.

  THE MEDIA REHASH CENTRAL BLOG

  NEW POST

  2:09 PM EASTERN STANDARD TIME

  I’M NUMB, AND if anyone is actually reading this, I have no doubt you are, too. My first thoughts after listening to the president was to think back over the last thirty-six hours, and remember all the places I’ve been and people I’ve talked to.

  There’ve been a lot. It also doesn’t help that I live in New York City, where I’ve lost count of how many containers they’ve found. I’m pretty sure I’m screwed.

  I received an email from a loyal follower right after the president’s address. He said, “He [the president] didn’t say it, but what he’s done is declare martial law. I’m not sure he has the right to do that. We need to challenge this. Our personal liberties are at stake!”

  Normally, I would agree. You all know me well enough to know that anything that encroaches so blatantly on our rights would be more than enough for me to raise the alarm.

  But, brother, I’ve got to tell you, on this one you’re an idiot. What the president was saying is that we are going to get hit, and hit HARD. He’s just trying to save whatever lives he can. If that means we need to hermetically seal ourselves inside steel drums, then that’s what we should do.

  This is about survival now, not our rights as citizens.

  I’m going to take a break, see how this all plays out. And I’m also going to turn off comments because at this point, what’s there really to say? Hopefully, I’ll be back when it’s all done. If not, well…

  Twenty-Three

  THE RANCH

  12:15 PM MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME

  ALL WORK IN the Bunker came to a standstill as the president spoke.

  “It’s not going to work,” Rachel said once the short speech was over.

  “It could save some lives,” Matt said. “It all depends on how long the virus stays active. If someone can wait it out, they’ll have a chance.”

  “For now, maybe. But we both know it will come back, like flu does every year. It’ll become part of the biosphere. If it doesn’t kill them now, it’ll kill them next time.”

  “We’ll just have to get them the vaccine first.”

  She stared at her brother. “And how are we supposed to do that? We only have a limited supply.”

  “At the moment,” he corrected her. “We’ll continue making it.”

  “It still might not be enough.”

  “Or it might be.”

  “We’ve been doing all we can for years, Matt, and what did that get us? We failed. The Project won. They’re going to get their restart, and we can’t stop it.”

  For the first time he noticed the circles under her eyes. “When was the last time you slept?”

  She glared at him, then whipped around and half ran toward the door.

  “Rachel!” he yelled. He tried to follow her, but with his leg, he could only go so fast. “Rachel!”

  Just before he got to the door, Christina called out, “Matt, I’ve got the men at the emergency tunnel on the phone. They’ve got the door open and are about to go through. They want to know if you still want to go with them.”

  Matt paused. If he kept after his sister, it would just make her more upset. What she really needed was sleep, not talk. Reluctantly, he said, “Tell them I’m on my way.”

  THE ONLY WAY out of the Bunker now was via a long tunnel that exited through a hidden hatch in the woods. Similar to the other two entrances, both of which were now unusable because of the fire, a large blast-like door had been slid into place when they went to full cover, sealing off the underground facility from the tunnel and the world above.

  While closing the massive door was easy, the built-in safeguards made opening it again considerably more difficult. It had taken the team over an hour to slide it open wide enough for people to pass through. When Matt arrived, all six of them were standing by, geared up and ready to move.

  “Let’s go,” he said, not wanting to waste any more time. Brandon and Hayes had been out there for over twenty-four hours now, and he would not relax until they were found.

  One of the team members handed Matt a coat and a pistol. One by one, they passed through the opening into the tunnel.

  The air grew colder as they approached the far end. When they reached the hatch, Matt toggled his radio.

  “We’re ready to go up,” he said.

  “All clear,” Christina replied through his earpiece.

  The lead m
an, Miller, released the lock on the hatch and carefully lowered the unhinged edge, revealing a metal plate above covering the hole. On top of the plate would be a layer of dead needles and loose branches providing the perfect camouflage to anyone looking for it on the other side. Working with two of his men—Reubens and Barlow—he maneuvered the plate up and to the side, clearing the way.

  As soon as they were all out of the tunnel, they headed down the road toward the barn. Hayes and Brandon had been heading back to the Bunker from there when the helicopters were spotted, so that was the logical starting point for Matt and his men.

  “I’ve got footprints,” Miller called out several minutes later.

  Matt limped over, his knee bothering him more than he was willing to admit. Miller was kneeling down, studying several prints.

  “Theirs?” Matt asked.

  “Must be,” Miller said. He pointed at the ground. “There’s a big set and a small set.”

  “This is as far as they got?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then they must have headed into the woods from here.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Looks to me like they headed back toward the barn.”

  “Back to the barn?”

  “Yeah. See?” Miller stood, pointed at some more tracks, and followed them down the road a dozen feet before stopping. He glanced at Matt. “They keep going.”

  “Then we follow them.”

  Why in the world would Jon take Brandon back to the barn? Matt wondered as they headed down the road. He had told Hayes to go into the forest and find one of the emergency supply stashes before hiking out to the highway. Going to the barn would have been extremely risky. The helicopters would have surely checked it.

  As they neared the barn, two of the men ran ahead, while the rest continued following the footprints.

  Miller stopped, still watching the ground. “It’s kind of a mess here. Tracks going to the barn and to the woods over there.” He pointed to the right.

  The men who’d gone to the barn jogged back up.

  “Well?” Matt asked.

  “No one’s there, but someone was,” one of the men said. “All the stalls are empty, and the horses are gone.”

  Matt looked past the two men at the barn, searching for any sign of the animals, but none were around.

  “Could they have ridden away on one of them?” Barlow asked.

  That thought had crossed Matt’s mind, too, but it would have been a huge risk. The attack team from Project Eden could easily have spotted them on a horse, and chased them down with one of their helicopters.

  “I think they went into the woods on foot,” Miller said. He crouched down next to the footprints. “These leading toward the trees? They’re on top of the other ones, so they’re the last ones made.”

  “They could have doubled back to the barn on the grass,” Barlow argued.

  Miller shrugged, conceding the point, but not seeming to buy into it.

  Matt looked at the barn, then at the woods. “I think the horses were only a diversion. Jon wouldn’t have risked taking one. We go into the woods.” He touched the transmit button on the radio. “Christina, what’s the closest emergency supply location from the barn?”

  There was a pause, then she said, “There are three within a two-mile radius. One is a mile and a half northwest of you, one almost due west three-quarters of a mile, and one is northeast just over half a mile. I can send you all of their coordinates, if you’d like.”

  Matt looked down at the prints Miller had found. The set on top was heading east. It was also the only logical direction to find civilization.

  “Just the last one for now,” he said. “We’ll check there first.”

  THERE WAS NO question that the emergency stash in the east was the one Jon and Brandon had visited. It was half uncovered, and many of the supplies were gone.

  Matt shone his flashlight into the tube. Per procedure, all the empty bags from the supplies they had taken had been put back inside, but, oddly, they had all been scrunched toward the bottom, like someone had crawled into the tube and stamped them down with their feet. An unnecessary step. Also, why had Hayes left the top half off? He should have replaced the metal plate and pushed the loose ground cover back over it.

  The men from the team were scattered around the area, searching every square inch for any clues.

  “Anything?” Matt called out.

  “They walked in together from over there,” Miller said, pointing in the same direction they had come from. “I also found two sets of prints heading away. They’re both going in the same general direction, but they’re not on the same path.”

  “You mean they split up?”

  “Or left at different times. Which is pretty much the same thing, I guess.”

  The team broke into two groups—Matt, Barlow, and two of the other men following Brandon’s prints; and Miller and the other two following Hayes’s. It wasn’t long before the two sets of tracks diverged enough that the groups were no longer in sight of each other.

  There was only one reason Matt could think of for Hayes and Brandon to split up. Someone from the Project Eden team must have been in the area. That also could explain the compacted bags in the storage tube. Perhaps Brandon was hiding inside.

  Matt could see the hint of a clearing ahead. Just before they reached it, the radio came to life.

  “Matt,” Miller said. “You need to come here.”

  “Where are you?”

  “There’s a clearing. It’s pretty much straight northeast of where—”

  “We’re just coming to it now,” Matt said.

  “You’ll see us once you get here.”

  As soon as Matt stepped out from the woods, he spotted the others. Miller and the two men with him were hunched over something on the ground. It wasn’t until Matt was a few feet away that he saw the legs of a man.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he said.

  Miller turned. “It’s Hayes.”

  “Dead?”

  Miller nodded. “Shot in the back.”

  Matt knelt down next to Miller and looked at the body. Hayes was lying on his back, part of his chest blown out.

  “You turned him over?” Matt asked. If Hayes had been shot in the back, he should have been lying on his stomach.

  “No. He was already like this.”

  So it was either the person who killed him who turned him over, or…

  God, let me be wrong.

  Matt struggled back to his feet. “We need to look for Brandon,” he said loudly enough for all of them to hear. “Spread out. Check everywhere.”

  After twenty minutes of searching, the only thing they discovered were depressions in the meadow where a helicopter had landed.

  That troubled Matt even more. Had they taken Brandon?

  They carefully checked the area around where the helicopter had been, but the ground was a mixture of dead grass and leaves, so no footprints had been left behind. No way to know who might have boarded the aircraft.

  “Miller,” Matt called out. When the man came over, he said, “I want you to do a circuit just outside the clearing. See if you can pick up Brandon’s trail again and figure out which way he went.”

  “No problem.”

  As Miller started to turn away, Matt said, “Look very hard.”

  Twenty-Four

  MONTANA

  12:17 PM MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME

  BRANDON HAD TOLD the woman what he could. The Ranch and the people there, he said nothing about. When she wondered how he knew what he did, he’d kept his mouth shut. He was confident she believed him, though; he could see it in her eyes.

  Once she had finished asking him questions, she’d let him get some food from the kitchen, where he noted the back exit out of the corner of his eye. She then ushered him back down to the room in the cellar.

  “Take an inventory,” she told him, pointing her gun at a clipboard hanging on t
he wall.

  His face scrunched in confusion. “What?”

  “Check to make sure everything on that list is still correct.”

  “Wouldn’t you already know that?”

  Her mouth tightened into a tense, straight line. “Just do it,” she said. She slammed the door closed and locked it again.

  Having no intention of counting cans and jars, he had spent most of the morning thinking of ways he could get away. They all came down to the same thing—if the opportunity presented itself, he would just run.

  A good enough plan, except for one big problem: the gun. Would she actually take a shot at him? He didn’t think so, but it was hard not to remember the hole in Hayes’s chest.

  While he’d been thinking, he could hear the woman walking around upstairs. She seemed to be in constant motion, moving from room to room, pulling open doors, scraping across the floor. She was still alone, though, so maybe the person she lived with wasn’t home. He hoped so.

  After a while, the woman turned up the volume on her computer so loud that he could hear the wah-wah-wah of the voices on the news resonating through the floor. Occasionally, he could even make out a word here and there, but mostly had no idea what was being said.

  As the time passed, he started thinking about that coming evening. He didn’t want to spend it in the cellar. He wanted to be away from there, as far as possible. He paced back and forth, his anxiety increasing.

  Finally, he stopped himself, knowing he needed to distract his mind so he wouldn’t wind himself up so much.

  He caught a glimpse of the clipboard.

  It’s better than nothing.

  So, despite his earlier decision, he began checking the woman’s supplies. In addition to the cans of cream of mushroom soup, there were hundreds of others containing pears, apricots, baked beans, lima beans, peas, pineapple chunks, Spam, and beets, just to name a few. The jars, with the exception of seventy-two containing Ragu spaghetti sauce, were all labeled on the lid and filled with things he guessed the woman had jarred herself—cherry preserves, apple sauce, pickles, stewed tomatoes, and the like.