Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2)

by Mather, Matthew

  Only sorrow.

  For her family, and for the world that had been lied to. Now she needed answers. Something terrible had been put upon her family, upon everyone’s families. A lie, a deception beyond all deceptions, and beneath it all—greed. If not for money, then for power and for control. Ultimately, for life. But she didn’t see any of that in Massarra’s eyes.

  “A great wrong has been done,” Jess said, her voice quiet. “Help me make something right of it.”

  Massarra edged back into the light.

  “What’s the Levantine council?” Jess said. “You can trust me, Massarra. I won’t let anyone here hurt you.”

  “You will not understand.”

  “Please.”

  The small woman closed her blue eyes and seemed to gather herself from the inside. “We were—we are—a political organization representing certain…” She paused. “…groups within the Middle East and beyond.” She paused again. “Islamic groups.”

  “But who are these groups? Do you mean—”

  “Terrorists!” Roger squealed. “I told you.”

  Massarra looked at him, her face riven by disgust. “Not terrorists. We are a peaceful, purely political organization. We also work with resistance movements, the Kurds, the governments, even with the Israelis. The answer to our problems was not going to come from the outside, by bombing or fighting. And it was not going to come from Western politicians. The Levantine movement was started to begin again the discussion of what Islam means, the peaceful side. We wanted to bring our people together. To stop the fighting, but on our own terms.”

  “So you knew me?” Jess asked. “In Rome. You knew who I was?”

  “Of course. We were sent to meet you.”

  “Sent to meet me?”

  “Our meeting was not by chance. Is this not clear?”

  “Who sent you?”

  “As I said, the Levantine Council.”

  “It was you that attacked me and my mother in the apartment that night? You were controlling Nico?” Jess gripped the edge of her plywood stretcher, her knuckles white.

  “That was not our doing.” Massarra’s eyes flitted to Roger.

  He laughed. “I had nothing to do with whatever happened in Rome.”

  “Somehow, I still believe everything from her mouth,” Giovanni said, “yet nothing from yours.”

  “And speaking of Rome,” Roger continued, ignoring him, glaring at Massarra, “remind me again, what happened to the Vatican?”

  “It was destroyed.”

  “Hundreds of thousands killed. Incinerated. By Islamic extremists. Her friends.”

  “Perhaps,” Massarra said quietly, “perhaps not.”

  “Are you kidding me? Who else? ISIS claimed responsibility—”

  “In fact they did not. That agenda was pushed upon them by media, by your governments.”

  “But they didn’t deny it.”

  Massarra pressed her lips together, balled her hands, but said nothing.

  “I have a question.” Giovanni raised one hand like a schoolboy. “What is so important about the Rollins family, that we have”—he frowned and shrugged at Roger—“something like the American CIA, and a secret society of Islamic clerics hunting them down, chasing them into this frozen wasteland beyond the end of the world?”

  The faintest of sad smiles flitted across the Muslim woman’s face. “Isn’t that obvious?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “The Rollins family, if you will excuse me, Jessica, has become almost mythical. They are the discoverers of Nomad, of the great destroyer. The great evil that wrecked the world. Have you not listened to the radios? To the broadcasts before Nomad?”

  Jess had, and she lowered her head. They blamed her father. They had to blame someone. “But he didn’t know.”

  “That is not what you told me, around the fire that night.”

  “Around the fire?” Jess frowned. “I never said—”

  “You said your father lied.”

  “I was talking about him lying to me.”

  Massarra held her hands together. “But if you remember, the Levantine councilors asked you about Nomad. Asked you if your father lied.”

  “I thought they were your uncles.”

  “You said he lied.”

  “You know I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “At the time, we didn’t,” Massarra replied gently.

  The words floated through the air and swirled into a maelstrom in Jess’s mind. “Wait, are you saying…that you were sent there to find the truth about Nomad, and your council thought that I said my father lied about Nomad? That he knew about it for thirty years?”

  “I am sorry, Jessica.” She bowed her head. “I was given a task. I didn’t know what it would mean.”

  In the silence, the wind ruffled the hangar’s fabric. A low, burbling cackle began, rising in pitch into a hissing giggle.

  “And her friends bombed the Vatican,” Roger cried out, gasping between sobs of laughter. “They destroyed it because you said your father lied.”

  Jess curled into a ball on her stretcher, pulling her legs into her stomach.

  “You guys better untie me,” Roger cackled. “You don’t know what’s coming. Let me go.”

  Jess tried to fathom what she’d learned. She misspoke, and that carelessness killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people. People coming to pray. People coming to pray for protection from something her father had discovered.

  “Let me go!” Roger screamed. “Or you’re all going to die!”

  NOVEMBER 10th

  Seventeen Days A.N.

  23

  FIRST LIGHT DRAGGED a thin dawn over the frozen earth. A suffuse gray reached down from the blackness to gradually reveal the rubble of the city around them. Jess sat, huddled under a mass of blankets, against the front of the hangar and watched Raffa and Giovanni and Hector. They stood, solemn and quiet, around the grave for Leone that Raffa had tried to dig into the hardscrabble earth below the ice and snow.

  In the end, an impossible task.

  A wooden cross—two beams lashed together with a length of cord—leaned at an angle from the pile of bricks and chipped cement they piled on top of Leone. The best that they could do.

  Already, Jess missed the old man. He’d watched over them—their guardian angel—never taking his eyes off Elsa or Rita, nor Roger or Massarra. She’d considered him paranoid, had chided him about it, but he had paid for her jokes with his life. With their watcher gone, the mantle fell to Jess. She’d brought them all on this path, on this crusade of hers.

  To end up here.

  She’d never felt so weak, so ill, and she hadn’t slept. She’d kept her eyes open the entire uneasy night. Roger groaned the whole time, half-conscious, alternating between apologies and threats. Delirious with fever from an infection, she guessed, or withdrawal, or dehydration or starvation—and he’d lost blood. Any of these conditions could account for his reaction. Plus he was an asshole. Giovanni refused him treatment, refused to deplete their stash of antibiotics and medicine on him.

  Jess did not object.

  None of them were healthy. The combination of malnutrition, stress, lack of sleep and the noxious, pervading atmosphere was eroding their immune systems. They coughed and wheezed, their eyes watered, their skins were both pale and flushed with rashes. Unable to sit upright without assistance, Jess had insisted on being helped to the front of the hangar, to say goodbye to Leone.

  Standing in front of the grave, Giovanni crossed himself. Raffa stood beside him, and they spoke for a while, the teenager’s face growing darker as they did. Eventually, he nodded and turned away as Giovanni trudged over the uneven ice to join Jess. “How are you feeling?” he asked her.

  “Like death warmed over. That’s in a good moment.”

  His face puckered.

  “I was trying to make a joke.”

  “Jokes are good.” He sat next to her and offered a ration pack, but she refused. Only a handful left.
He insisted. “You need your strength.”

  “What did Raffa want?”

  “He asked about Rita,” Giovanni replied. “He wanted to know what happened. How Leone was shot.”

  Jess nodded. Raffa and Rita had been growing close. She’d seen it. Snatched moments of affection these last few days. He must have felt utterly betrayed. “So now what?”

  She opened the pack and took out the crackers, offered one to him. He refused. She insisted. The early stages of starvation had begun. Five days since they’d had to escape from Vivas and leave their food behind. Five days now that they’d been on less than half rations, and soon there wouldn’t be anything left at all. They’d have to scavenge to eat, or more likely, survive off whatever fat they had left on their bones.

  “We can’t fly.”

  “What if we patch the wing?”

  “The Cessna can still fly. I’m saying I cannot fly that thing.”

  “What about Al-Jawf? Ain Salah said he might be able to arrange a flight.”

  “We’d need to be truthful, tell them we only have a copy of the data. Maybe a copy.” He sat in silence and watched the crumpled ruins of the town reveal themselves through the morning mist. Not a fog, but fine suspension of ice crystals. Twelve below and dropping. “We can’t stay here. If what Roger is saying is true—”

  “They will be back for him. But not for us.”

  “The one advantage we have is that they think you’re dead.”

  “Advantage…” Jess sniffed. “And I was dead. I should be dead. I was responsible for the biggest mass murder in human history.” Jess pulled the blankets up to cover her face.

  “What Massarra describes is just the excuse, and she says her people had nothing to do with the Vatican bombing. Besides, and I know that it’s not the best consolation, but of those who died, how many would have survived Nomad?” He pulled the blankets away from her face. “And you didn’t die, your heart just slowed down.”

  “You said it stopped.” Jess took a deep breath, but couldn’t feel air fill her lungs.

  Was she dead? Was this hell? Had she become a shadow, cursed to wander this underworld, never dying, hearing the screams of all those she’d cast into doom? She watched the hummocks of rubble laid out into the distance, the mist swirling around them, the ghosts of the dead speaking to her in the wind scratching ice crystals across the snow. A witch, that’s what she was, what she’d become. Cast the bones, see the future, that’s what she’d been trying to do with her father’s data.

  Giovanni pulled one of the blankets around himself and joined her in staring into the distance. “So what did you see then, when you were dead?”

  She closed her eyes and let herself slide back. The shock of the cold, the terror of her fingernails scraping across the ice, her desperation in begging even her attacker for help. The water filling her lungs. But then. No fear. Just sadness. “My mother, my father…you…nothing…”

  “Nothing?”

  “Because everything is here. Everything I love is here.” Raffa and Hector still knelt beside the grave of Leone.

  “There is hope,” Giovanni said, his voice tender. “Just knowing places like Sanctuary and Vivas exist, humans will survive, and I want to—”

  “Not if Earth hits Saturn. We still don’t know what will happen in a year and a half.”

  “But if Earth was to hit Saturn, do you think whoever is chasing you would bother? Doesn’t that prove it will not happen?”

  “A million evil men now rule the world,” Jess muttered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Listen to me.” Giovanni squatted in front of her. “They think you’re dead. So, we set a trap. Leave Roger here—”

  “No more. I wanted to protect my father’s legacy, our name, but he wouldn’t want this. He’d want me to protect my family. And my name is a curse. They think I’m dead, so I’ll stay dead. We change my name, change yours. We run south. The two snowmobiles we retrieved from the Vivas men who Massarra shot, they work?”

  “And we have fuel, yes.”

  “You said we could do a hundred kilometers a day on them.”

  “Packed light.”

  Jess laughed, a hacking, wet cough of a laugh. “We don’t have much left.”

  “We can’t go inland from here. Not past Vivas. And over land to the south—”

  “Too much up and down, too many obstacles,” Jess completed the thought for him. She liked it when they made plans. “And we need to stay away from any other people, as much as possible.”

  It was something they’d talked about a lot. Three weeks past Nomad, whoever had survived in this wilderness, they would have scavenged the remains of what was left. But whatever they had, and whatever they found, would run out soon.

  Quietly one night, Giovanni had pointed out that the biggest source of protein left was frozen human corpses, hundreds of pounds of meat littered almost everywhere they went. It was disgusting, disturbing, but true. And once that line was crossed—

  “We can’t get on the radio and talk to Ballie Booker and the Jolly Roger, if they even survived,” Jess added. “Or Ain Salah at Al-Jawf. We need to do this ourselves.”

  “And whoever from Sanctuary is trying to catch you, they destroyed Vivas, if what our Muslim friend is saying is true.”

  Jess inhaled deep and turned to look at Massarra. A hundred yards across the airfield, at the edge of a copse of bare, frozen trees, the small woman stood praying over the gravestones she’d piled atop the body of Abdullah-shah.

  She was still an enigma.

  She’d lied, but somehow in a more honest way, and like Jess, she was seeking the truth. That was why she came back, she said, why she tried to lead the Vivas attackers away and braved the frozen wasteland to find Jess again. Someone had set this trap, having Jess in Rome, having the Levantine councilors meet her there, and Massarra was determined to discover who it was. In her last words to Abdullah-shah, she’d promised she would find out who had deceived them.

  Someone within Sanctuary was responsible, Massarra was certain, now that she’d learned of its existence. It made sense to her. They were trying to kill Jess, to kill her father, and erase any trace of his data. Why, Massarra didn’t know, but now she wanted to get inside Sanctuary herself.

  And somehow, Jess was sure this fierce woman would make it in.

  Jess was on a different mission now. When she’d died, when the blackness had engulfed her, all she longed to do was spend more time with the ones she loved. Now she had a second chance. Her mother and father were gone, but Raffa and Lucca, Hector and Giovanni were here.

  “We run. It’s what I’ve always been best at. Running.”

  Jess began to pull away her nest of blankets. Whatever energy she could muster, it was time to leave this place.

  “Two snowmobiles, Raffa and Lucca on one, you, me and Hector on the other. We’ll rig fuel sleds for us to pull. We’ll go fast, along the edge of the water.”

  All of this might have been a blessing in disguise.

  Without the snowmobiles, they wouldn’t be able to skim along the smooth snow and ice at the water’s edge. The jet’s gas would work as a high-octane fuel for the snowmobiles. Her attackers thought she was dead, and they had the data they wanted. She was free. They were free to run to safety.

  And they might still have a copy of her father’s information.

  “Roger said that in two days, another cluster of Jovian asteroids would intersect the Earth,” Giovanni, pointed out. “We need to be away from the water.”

  “That’s in two days. If an asteroid hits us, game over. And we watch the skies. If we see flashes in the sky, we head inland immediately.”

  “We might not see the flashes.”

  “We’ll see the water recede if a tsunami is coming. So we ride along the edge of the water, and camp on land, as high up as possible.”

  Giovanni bent over to wrap his arms around her and help her to her feet. “One problem.”

/>   “Roger.”

  “And Massarra. Two problems.”

  “Let them have Roger. And Massarra can take care of herself.”

  “But then they’ll know that you’re alive. And that you have a copy of the data.”

  Thick plumes of white vapor filled the air between them on each breath.

  “So then give him the memory key.”

  “That won’t stop them. And you can’t trust Roger…”

  He was right. Jess cursed under her breath. Roger. The man was half-dead anyway, so what would pushing him over the edge into the eternal matter? And he’d spied on her father. He even revealed that he’d told Nico, when he was captured, about Sanctuary. Begged him to let him go. It was why Salman had chased them into this frozen wasteland, to get the data, to get the prize.

  Massarra was another matter.

  She claimed she had come back to find Jess, to find the truth, but also because she believed Jess was undertaking a mission ordained by God. She had sworn her life to Jess. It should have sounded nutball, but it didn’t, not coming from her lips. The woman could be an asset, with her connections into extremist groups, but she could also be just as much a liability. She wanted to get inside Sanctuary—somewhere Jess wanted to stay away from as much as possible.

  “I’ll let you decide,” Giovanni said, his face just inches from hers.

  She took two deep breaths. “Okay. But, Giovanni, if it were up to you?”

  “I would kill them both.”

  24

  “IS YOUR MAN still alive?”

  The Englishman balanced a jagged-edged hunting knife on the tip of his index finger.

  Salman shrugged, his expression somewhere between I-don’t-know and I-don’t-care. Tent fabric flapped in a stiff wind. White clouds of vapor puffed out with each labored breath. “Perhaps we go inside?”

  He tested his cleft lip. Raw-red and cracked. Unconsciously, his tongue darted out to wet it, and he wiped his face with the back of one dirty hand.