Justice Ascending

by Rebecca Zanetti

  Sami reached out. “My hand.”

  Jax poured some in her hand, and she fed it to Tace.

  He grimaced but swallowed the salt. Slowly, the tremors subsided. He took several deep breaths and then tried to sit up. Raze grabbed his upper arm and assisted him. “Thanks.”

  Lynne looked at Sami. “Salt sometimes helps with seizures in people who are vitamin B6–deficient. How did you know?”

  Sami paled and sat back on her knees. “He’s not deficient. His body is rejecting the vitamin B concoction.”

  Lynne frowned. “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen it before,” she murmured, her shoulders slumping. She swallowed, and Tace could swear her lips formed the words I’m sorry. She took a deep breath. “It was one of the things they studied.”

  “Studied?” Jax dusted salt off his hands. “Who are they? Where did they study this?”

  She kept her gaze on Tace. Her entire body shuddered, and her eyes lost all expression. “At the Bunker. It’s one of the things the scientists studied at the nearest Bunker.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The sum of all mistakes can be wrapped up into one decision made in one moment.

  —Sami Steel

  Sami waited outside the conference room, sitting on the steps leading to the apartments. Everyone would gather in five minutes, and she’d have to tell the truth. She dropped her chin onto her hand, unable to stop the flashback.

  She’d been in North Dakota with her soon-to-be exboyfriend, the smartest man she’d ever met. They were alone in the basement of a three-story office building he’d purchased with money stolen from a hotel magnate. “What have you done?” she whispered, her hands shaking.

  Spiral had looked up, his soft blue eyes now gleaming and somehow darker. “This has to end. Everything we’ve done, everything that has happened, is all retribution. Don’t you get it? God is mad.”

  Sami swallowed. Servers lined one wall, consoles another. “What are you talking about?” She’d joined him in his crusade to track down Internet predators and people working in the slave trade, and she’d known many of their methods were illegal. Hacking into secured federal government databases had been a necessary evil.

  That had put their names on FBI wanted lists.

  She could live with that, but as the code for a new computer virus flashed across the bigger wall screen, her heart stopped. “Spiral. You didn’t.”

  “I did.” At twenty-six, Spiral Samuelson looked much younger with his pale skin, blue eyes, and clean-shaven face. He was tall and wiry, and he had read multiple books on how to please a woman.

  They’d been dating four months when he’d contracted the fever but protected her from getting ill. Most of their friends had died, and it appeared that the infection was running rampant across the country.

  Two weeks after Spiral had survived Scorpius, Sami began to notice a change in her boyfriend. He’d started memorizing the Bible, and he’d begun chatting with people on the Net about Armageddon. At first, she’d thought he was just reacting to the impossible world they were about to face, but now? Now she could see madness in his programming.

  A line of code caught her eye, and she fell back, her heart almost stopping. “Oh my God.”

  Spiral nodded and gleefully jumped up and down. “It’s a computer virus, Sam. See it? See what it can do? Not just bacteria are dangerous to us . . . look what I made.”

  She shook her head. “No,” she whispered. He’d created a bug that attacked software and changed the routing to null. “This won’t work long-term.” She could come up with a software fix if she had enough time.

  “Yes, it will.” He lifted his chin. “I’ve hit all thirteen root servers, and the key is . . . there aren’t enough people working to fix them. Scorpius has either killed or is currently attacking most of the people who maintain those servers.”

  She coughed. It was possible. “Stop it. You have to stop it.”

  Spiral cackled like a crazy witch. “The Internet is going down, baby. Say good-bye to technology. God wants us back to basics.”

  “No.” She grabbed her keyboard and started furiously typing, trying to delete the code. The barrel of a gun pressed against her temple. She stilled and turned slightly. “Spiral?”

  He pressed harder. “Don’t deny God.”

  “God doesn’t want this,” she croaked out. “God likes the Internet. You can’t do this.”

  “I just did.” His grip on the gun remained steady, and he leaned forward to be closer to the screen. “Oh, look. Six of the servers have already been infected. I also created a secondary attack with several automatic software updates. The Internet is about to be gone.”

  “The Internet is like a worm. Take out some of it, and the rest will survive.” Tears clogged her eyes.

  “Only with proper maintenance and fixes,” he said happily. “We don’t have those any longer.”

  Bile rose in her throat.

  An explosion sounded from upstairs, rocking the entire basement.

  “Shit.” Spiral pointed his gun at the computers and started firing. “I think the Brigade is here.”

  Sami screamed and shoved herself out of the way, running for the stairs.

  Instantly her way was blocked by soldiers wearing combat gear, even their faces covered by masks. One grabbed her and took her down, zip-tying her wrists before she thought to fight back.

  Spiral fired at them, and two soldiers fired back, killing the computer expert.

  One guy yanked Sami to her feet while ripping off his mask. He had dark brown skin and even darker eyes. “Sami Steel?”

  She gulped and nodded.

  He gestured at the equipment. “Get everything you can.” After issuing the order, he dragged her up the stairs and outside into the empty, rainy street.

  She struggled, seeing a transport van. “Where are we going?”

  The soldier paused. “You’re going to the Bunker to fix this mess. Our orders were to take Spiral and kill you, but since he fired, you’re on.” He all but shoved her into the back of the van.

  She struggled against the restraints. “Where is the Bunker?”

  “California.” He slammed the doors shut.

  Vinnie touched Sami’s shoulder and pulled her out of the past. “Let’s go sit down.”

  Sami nodded and followed her into the war room, where everyone quickly entered and sat. She needed to throw up. Her legs wobbled, even while sitting.

  She tried to keep from panicking and running from the conference room as she sat at the sprawling table with Lynne, Jax, Vinnie, Raze, and Tace. The entire elite force of Vanguard looked at her, all waiting for some sort of explanation.

  Many times during her formative years, she’d been called to the principal’s office, so this was a feeling she remembered well. That was before she’d been arrested, of course. It was too late to turn back since she’d dropped the bomb about the Bunker, but what if they didn’t believe her? Even if they did, she already knew the outcome of this meeting.

  Jax sat at the head of the table, directly across from her. The Vanguard leader’s expression had gone to watchful, which was never a good sign.

  Yet the man at her right held her attention. Tace was still pale, but a hardness had entered his blue eyes the second he’d realized what she’d said.

  “Explain.” It was Tace who’d given the order.

  She nodded. “All right. First, you all need to know that the Bunker isn’t this great place where we’ll all be saved.”

  “No. Start at the beginning.” Jax’s voice was clipped.

  She sighed. “Fine. I’m not LAPD.”

  “No shit,” Tace muttered. “Who the fuck are you?”

  The Texan rarely swore at women, and never at her. This was so not good. “I’d say out of everyone here, you know exactly who I am,” she snapped back at him.

  “I don’t think so,” he returned, his rugged face a hard mask of stone. “Get to it.”

  “Fine. I, ah, am a
hacker.” She kept her voice level when all she wanted to do was beg them to still like her. “A computer hacker. One of the best, actually.”

  “The fighting skills?” Jax asked.

  “Truth. Dad owned a karate studio, my uncle a street-fighting gym, and they started us young. I had fun, learned a lot, and bonded with my dad over grappling. Then I learned a few more tricks from the US military when I worked for the government.”

  “As a hacker,” Tace drawled.

  “No. I was a hacker in high school, got arrested with my boyfriend Cricket because we hacked into a secured courthouse document center to get his uncle out of jail. We got caught, and it led to a job offer and free education from Uncle Sam if I agreed to keep working for the government after school. Cricket died the next year in a car accident.” Man, she’d missed that lost boy. He’d come from a bad family and had been angry . . . and brilliant. “I, ah, got tired of working for the government and went out on my own.”

  “So you were wanted by the law?” Jax asked.

  Sami nodded. “Yeah, but I hooked up with a group that used, ah, unlawful methods to take down sex traders and pedophiles, so I don’t think the law really wanted us until Scorpius hit.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Jax snapped.

  She winced. “Seriously? You, Raze, and Tace are all former military, Lynne worked for the CDC, and Vinnie worked for the FBI. The FBI wanted me, damn it. I couldn’t tell all of you guys that I was a criminal and not a good government person like you all were.”

  “That’s why you pretended to be LAPD,” Lynne said softly.

  “Yeah. I wanted to belong here, and that did it.” It was the first time in her life she’d felt complete and like she was doing something good that other people couldn’t do. She was special, and she worked hard. Very hard.

  “Did you take down the Internet when Scorpius got bad?” Tace drawled.

  She sucked in air. “No, but I was with the guy who did. I tried to stop him, failing, by the way. Soldiers showed up and there was a firefight.”

  Lynne gasped. “You saw the Brigade?”

  Sami shrugged. “Spiral thought they were the Brigade, but they were just soldiers from the Bunker, who brought me to Los Angeles and the Bunker there.” The Brigade was the country’s first line of defense when Scorpius had taken over, but Sami wondered if they really existed any longer.

  Jax sat forward. “There are more Bunkers?”

  “Yeah.” She drummed her fingers on the table, her nerves short-circuiting. “The Bunker is actually a series of underground facilities spread across the country, all with resources and unique purposes.”

  Lynne gasped. “How many are there?”

  Sami shook her head. “I honestly don’t know. Based on the infrastructure and data I worked on, I’d say about ten, but I could be off a couple in either direction.” Even though everyone was angry at her, the relief she felt in telling the truth made her constant jaw ache stop. Finally.

  Jax shook his head. “You said LA. The Bunker is in Los Angeles?”

  “Yes. It’s located beneath the Maritime Plaza building in Century City,” she said, forcing herself to face them all. Her legs itched with the need to run hard and fast.

  Lynne’s jaw dropped open. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. There are several floors beneath the lobby, all cement, and all owned secretly by the government,” she said. “None of the businesses in the building had any clue about the Bunker.”

  “Unbelievable,” Tace muttered. “The entire time it has been right here, and you haven’t said a word.”

  “Why is that?” Vinnie asked almost gently.

  Sami focused on the ex-profiler. “I escaped the Bunker and I don’t want to go back. Ever.”

  “Escaped?” Raze asked. “You had safety from Scorpius underground, and you escaped that?”

  “Yes. My family became infected, and I wanted to go home to be with them, and we were on lockdown. At that point, we already knew about the vitamin B concoction, so I’d been taking supplements, which helped when I contracted the disease after I’d escaped.” She’d arrived home to find most of her family already gone, but her sister had hung on—for a short while.

  “Why didn’t you go back afterward?” Lynne asked.

  “I didn’t want to go back at that point,” Sami said, her voice quavering. She cleared her throat. “The Bunker became hell, I’m telling you. All of a sudden we went from a computer center to an experimentation hellhole. It was horrible.”

  “Experimentation?” Tace asked.

  “Yes. The computer center was just part of the underground bunker, and there was a whole other side I was unaware of until right before I left. It was a myriad of cells and genetic labs that was largely unused until Scorpius. Then it became a place to not only create and store the vitamin B concoction but a place to conduct experiments on survivors—cruel ones.”

  Jax reared back. “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” she whispered. “So a couple of us figured out how to override the system—it was still on its own generators—and open all the cell doors. Then we ran. I’ve probably committed treason at the very least.”

  “Again,” Tace muttered.

  She shivered from his furious tone. “Huh?”

  His chin lowered, and his gaze remained hard. “You committed treason again.”

  “Yeah,” she said softly. There was no way he’d forgive her.

  “The experiments—did they lead to a cure for Scorpius?” Lynne asked, her face pale.

  “I don’t know,” Sami said, her stomach churning. “All research from all over the world was centralized there in the LA Bunker, so if a cure was discovered, they’d have it.”

  “Why didn’t they come forward then?” Jax asked. “I mean the doctors or scientists or whoever.”

  “They didn’t have a cure when I escaped,” Sami said. “Maybe they have one now, but there’s no way to get the word out. Or maybe they’re waiting for most of the world to die off and then plan on taking over. I truly have no clue.”

  “So you lied to me about being a cop,” Jax said quietly.

  “There were rumors about you, Jax. That you were put in place here by the leaders of the Bunker.” Now she could see they had been untrue, but it had kept people in the Bunker from reaching out to Mercury for help. “I figured if you thought I was LAPD, you’d let me into the inner circle, and I could see how dangerous you were.”

  “Have you?” Jax asked quietly.

  She shivered at the low tone. “Yes.” The man was beyond dangerous, but he wasn’t part of the Bunker. “I know you don’t work for them.”

  “What about me?” Tace asked. “You said you knew what was happening to me earlier when I went into convulsions.”

  She nodded, her throat closing. “Yeah. I compiled the data on one subset of the vitamin B concoction, and there’s a very small percentage of Scorpius survivors, incredibly small, actually, who reject the B therapy after a couple of weeks. The seizures, rash, and numbness are indicators.”

  “So what happened to them?” Tace asked.

  “The first dozen died, but then they discovered a cure. Some enzyme that allowed the recipient to accept the B concoction,” she said, grinding her palm into her eye. “I just did data input and didn’t pay attention to the actual cure. I’m sorry.”

  Lynne turned to Jax. “We have to get the data. Not only for Tace, but if the researchers were on top of Scorpius, maybe they’ve found a cure. Or at least a way for women to reach full-term pregnancies.”

  Sami shook her head. “The soldiers at the Bunker are armed and fanatical—they definitely are not the Brigade soldiers. I’m sorry. Infiltrating the Bunker would be nearly impossible.”

  Jax pushed away from the table and dragged over a whiteboard. “Then I guess you’d better get busy giving us the layout of the entire facility, Sami. Afterward we’ll decide what to do with you.”

  Sami blinked, and her stomach cramped. Would Jax kick her ou
t of Vanguard? While that should be her foremost concern, she couldn’t help but concentrate on the silent Texan next to her.

  Would Tace ever forgive her?

  Chapter Eighteen

  One little lie, and I felt the monster inside me break his chains.

  —Tace Justice

  Sami curled into her side, facing her window. She wanted to sleep, but memories kept attacking her. With a sigh, she forced herself to count sheep, and soon she was dreaming again.

  The nightmare, inevitable as it was, slid right into another dream.

  Two months after being taken to the Bunker in California, she continued fighting Spiral’s computer virus, which had taken longer than he’d no doubt planned to infiltrate so much software. She knew she wouldn’t be able to stop the shutdown, but she had to try. And all the while, the files she’d found earlier were burning through her brain.

  Just what was this place?

  Dr. Ramirez stalked into the room, his eyes tired, a white lab coat over his thinning frame. “Anything?”

  She shook her head. “No. The Internet will go down.” She cleared her throat and concentrated on the man in charge of the Los Angeles facility. “I did find a couple of files on the laboratory area.”

  His thin lips pursed. “None of your business.”

  Her stomach ached. “The bodies you’ve burned . . . there are so many. How can—”

  “Enough.” He glanced down at his watch. “Keep working.” Then he turned on his heel and exited the room.

  She glanced back at the screen. “Apparently, you’ve forgotten what I do,” she whispered, typing furiously and finding the code within minutes. She stood and left the room, walking through sterile white hallways to the medical lab. A keypad was on the door.

  “Sami?” George Bankel asked, looking up from a computer. “What’s up?”

  She smiled at the former Harvard computer programming professor. “Just stretching my legs. You?”

  The man glanced at his clock. “Ah. Time to pray. I’ll be back.”

  She’d known it was his time to face Mecca, and she waited until he’d left her alone in the center. Many people had succumbed to Scorpius, so the hustle and bustle of the computer center had ebbed. She ran past the refrigerators holding icky-looking vials of dangerous stuff and to the keyboard, typing in the code she’d uncovered.