Out of Nowhere

by Rebecca York

  “If you mean, when is the governor going to Sea Kingdom, you’ve got two days.”

  She moaned again. “I have to—”

  “You have to rest, because if you’re in this kind of shape, you won’t be able to do anything.”

  Annie closed her eyes, then opened them and looked pleadingly at Katie. “Can’t you give me something to make me okay?”

  “Not now. You have to rest,” the physician said, echoing Max.

  Annie looked as if she wanted to leap off the bed.

  Max put a hand on her shoulder. “Do I have to tie you down?”

  She sighed. But she must have seen the determination in his eyes because she said, “No.”

  He fought to tamp down his own fears. When she licked her dry lips, he asked, “do you want some water?”

  “Yes.”

  He picked up a glass and held a straw to her lips. Just sucking in a little water seemed to tire her.

  “We’ll talk about Sea Kingdom later,” he murmured.

  She looked pleadingly at him. “Not later. You don’t understand. I remember it all now. And it’s…it’s a miracle I can tell you about it. Remember before that I got a headache when you tried to break through my memory?”

  He nodded. “When I hypnotized you.”

  “Yes. My head hurt so much then.” She looked at Katie. “I guess whatever Thorn did changed something in my brain. I mean, I have my memory back. And…and I can tell you what I remember. You must have broken the block my Handlers put in me. I can talk about it now.”

  “Your Handlers?” Max asked carefully. “What the hell do you mean?”

  She looked at him, her gaze piercing. “The people who trained me. They were called Handlers. They were the ones who did…something to me so I can open locks. Like on the handcuffs and at the storage shed. They sent me here. And what I have to tell you is so bad you probably won’t believe me. Not when your world is so different. But I come from—” she stopped and seemed to gather her resolve “—well, about two hundred years in the future. You can’t imagine what it’s like. Pollution. Not enough food. The squads hunt down illegal children and kill them, because only a few people are allowed to have babies at all. People whose genes are undamaged. That’s…that’s why we are taught to think sex is nasty.”

  “Then what about dime girls?” he asked.

  Her face darkened. “There are men who have the credits to pay… We don’t talk about those things. There are a lot of things we don’t talk about. Like what happens to illegal children. But I know, because…of Suli.”

  She stopped for a moment, apparently gathering her strength. “Momma hid us. But they found us. They took us to the holding pens. I was okay. But not Suli.”

  “Your sister?”

  “Yes. I told you. Before they took Momma away, she begged me to watch out for Suli. But I couldn’t. They killed her.”

  The guilt in her voice made him reach for her and fold her close. “You couldn’t do anything. You were just a kid, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “But it doesn’t make me feel good about it.”

  He was trying to grapple with everything she had said, trying to imagine the horror she’d lived through. Trying to imagine how it had affected her.

  Then she began talking again. “Max, it all started when Governor Bradley went to Sea Kingdom. That’s in the history files. My history. That’s when Charles Carpenter released a genetically engineered virus. People from all over the country were there. People from around the world. They took it home with them, and there were outbreaks everywhere. Most people who got it died. The world population was decimated. And the world fell apart. Your world. There were riots. Panic. The police couldn’t handle it. Everything started going to hell. We had to put on a P-suit just to go out of the caves. A suit like I was wearing when I arrived here.”

  “You pulled the helmet off,” he said, remembering when he’d first seen her.

  “Yes. I felt like I was suffocating.”

  He stared down at her. He remembered the suit, but that didn’t make her story true.

  His expression must have told her he was having trouble believing. Urgently, she went on, “You know I’m afraid of loud noises. You remember how I went into a panic when that smoke alarm went off. Well, that’s like the alarm when the raiders come. The raiders who live outside the complex and are all sick and half-crazy from the air they breathe. They come in to kill as many of us as they can and steal what they can. I used to be terrified of the alarm when I was a kid. In the boat, when I couldn’t remember my past, I guess I got that mixed up with all the people who died from the virus.”

  She looked down at the cat and stroked its soft gray fur, then looked back at Max. “There is nothing soft or nice in my world. No cats. If there were, someone would eat it, not pet it.”

  Max clung to her free hand, still struggling to take in her story.

  “You don’t believe me,” she said in a weary voice. “If you won’t help me, I’ll have to go down there and try to stop him myself.”

  “I believe you,” Thorn said from the doorway.

  All heads turned toward him.

  “Why?” she asked in a thin voice.

  “Because you have antibodies in your blood that are protecting you against a disease that doesn’t yet exist.” He looked at Max. “A disease that would have killed her long ago if she didn’t have the protection.”

  Max felt his breath catch. “You’re sure?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Then what the hell are we going to do?”

  “Help her stop Charles Carpenter,” Thorn said.

  “Thank you,” Annie breathed, then looked down at her hospital gown. “I need to get dressed. We need to have another meeting, so I can tell everybody what I know.” She looked from Max to Thorn and back again. “You may decide that you don’t want to help me, that it’s too dangerous.”

  “We’ll help you,” Max said. He was pretty sure the rest of the people here would go along with him, too. If they wouldn’t, he’d do it himself. Because he knew Annie was going down to that damn theme park unless the sky fell first, and he wasn’t going to let her do it alone.

  BERT TRAINER looked at the remains of his lunch spread on the motel-room table. Southern fried chicken. One of his favorites. But today he hadn’t been able to do justice to the “secret spice” combination. What he had eaten wasn’t sitting well in his stomach.

  In the background, the TV was playing a promo loop of area attractions. Even with the sound turned down, it was annoying. But he kept it on as he crossed to the dressing table, shook an antacid out of the bottle and popped it into his mouth.

  As he chewed it, he stuffed the leftover lunch into a paper bag. He’d been taking stomach medications for years. Now they were doing little to calm the roiling in his gut. He’d felt sick ever since the DEA had scooped up Nicki Armstrong and Hap Henderson. But he’d escaped. He’d been lucky.

  “Lucky Bert,” he muttered aloud.

  He’d led a charmed life for the past thirty years, since he’d arrived in Florida. He had a job he loved, a nice source of extra money, a lot of it socked away in a Swiss bank account. A comfortable little house. Women who gave him free sex. All the amenities he’d come to crave.

  Somehow he’d convinced himself that it could go on forever. Or at least until he died a natural death. But Annie Oakland’s arrival had shaken him out of his daydream. He’d found a one-piece suit under the bunk in the small cabin of The Wrong Stuff. He wanted to ask her about that and a lot of other things.

  He wanted to interrogate the living hell out of her. Make her come clean about why she was here in Florida. But she and Max Dakota had cleared out of Hermosa Harbor too fast, although they’d left some nice, convenient notes. Which raised an interesting question. Were the notes for real? Or had they been planted to raise his blood pressure?

  He growled a curse. They didn’t know who he was. They couldn’t know.

  But who i
n the name of the saints was Max Dakota, anyway? Bert had thought the guy was in town to snoop into the drug business—maybe as an investor. It had been hard to pin him down. Now it looked as if the whole performance could have been a smoke screen.

  Maybe he’d been in Florida all along waiting for Annie. But why? How did he know about her?

  Bert closed his eyes, then blinked them open as the Sea Kingdom part of the promo came on. Unwillingly, he walked across the room and turned up the sound. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he studied the park—the crowds, the buildings, the huge outdoor water tanks.

  But watching it on TV didn’t substitute for the real thing. As soon as his stomach felt better, he was going over there to look around.

  KATIE CLEARED the room so Annie could get dressed while Max hurried off to tell everyone about the developments.

  Twenty minutes later, when Annie entered the lounge dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt, and still not quite sure of her footing, the group applauded her.

  She stopped, looking startled, then flustered.

  Max got up and steadied her, then led her to one of the couches.

  “Why are they clapping?” she asked him in a low voice.

  “Because they know what you’ve been through. Because they know how brave you are.”

  “I’m not brave. I’m scared.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “Being scared is okay.” He longed to whisk her off where they could talk privately about the two of them. But he’d come to understand any plans he had for them must be put on hold, because the future was going to be pretty grim if Charles Carpenter succeeded in releasing the virus.

  Annie looked pale as she sat on the sofa. Max handed her a decaf latte laced with butterscotch syrup.

  He watched her take a sip, relished the look of pleasure on her face.

  “Feeding you is so gratifying,” he murmured.

  “This has some of that butterscotch?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  She sighed and took another sip. “You don’t know how lucky you are to be able to eat this way.”

  He nodded, then looked up to see the others taking it in. And he knew that they were getting the point he’d made.

  She drank several more sips, licked her lips, then set down the mug. “I’m not used to…to lecturing.”

  “Take your time,” Jed Prentiss said.

  She gave him a grateful look, then smiled as Harriet dashed toward her, jumped up on the couch and settled down beside her.

  “She likes me!”

  “She has good taste,” Max said.

  Annie stroked the cat’s gray fur. “She made that noise before. What is it?”

  “She’s purring. That’s how she says she’s happy.”

  Annie bent to the cat for a few more moments, then looked up at the people turned expectantly toward her.

  He saw her swallow. But she didn’t flinch as she began to speak—starting with a very good analogy.

  “I want to tell you about a virus,” she said, “something a lot worse than that anthrax attack you all know about.”

  That got everybody’s attention. She went on to tell them what she’d already told Max and Katie, adding what Thorn had said about the antibodies.

  Max watched her and watched the other people in the room, judging their reactions. They seemed to be staying with her.

  “I’ve never heard of Charles Carpenter,” Jason Zacharias said when she finally wound down. “What’s his motivation?”

  “He belongs to a group that wants to bring down the U.S. government. We think he picked the day the governor visited the park to make a point.”

  “How did he get the virus?”

  “From a laboratory operating in what you call the Middle East.”

  “What do you call it?” Max asked.

  “The poison zone.”

  That got their attention.

  “But if Carpenter’s spreading the virus, won’t it kill him, too?” Katie asked.

  Annie swallowed hard. “It’s a suicide mission. Like mine—only I didn’t know it.”

  Max gripped her hand, and she clung to him in the sudden silence.

  Jed cleared his throat. “Why can’t we just tell the police? Can’t they scoop him up?”

  “They won’t know who he is. He’ll release the virus before they can stop him.”

  “How will you know Carpenter?”

  She spread her hands. “My Handlers tied me to him. With something they called a touchstone.”

  Max could see that she’d just lost her audience. “You have to explain that,” he said gently.

  “They had DNA material from him. In one of their first experiments, they sent a probe back to collect it. The capsule was waiting for them, in my time. They grafted some of his cells onto me, to sensitize me. I can’t explain what that means, exactly. But when I get close to him, I’ll know who he is. I guess it wasn’t supposed to activate until near the day of the virus attack.” She clenched and unclenched her hands. “I can feel him now. Just a little. I’m too far away to know where he is.” She looked at Max. “That’s what I meant when I woke up.”

  He nodded, wondering how the others were reacting to her explanation.

  She was obviously wondering the same thing. “I know it’s a lot to believe,” she murmured. “You have to take it on faith, because I can’t prove it to you.”

  “Given future technology, it’s possible,” Jed said slowly.

  “And if she’s right, we have to try to stop him,” Jason added.

  Max wanted to get up and hug the two men, but he stayed beside Annie.

  “Ten years ago,” Annie continued, “our scientists came up with the plan to send somebody back to stop Carpenter. They’ve been trying to make it work for five years. I know they sent people before me,” she said. “But nothing has changed. They think maybe they arrived at the wrong time. Too early. Or too late. Or someone was sent to prevent the mission from succeeding.”

  “Who would do that? Who would know?”

  She shrugged. “I can’t tell you. But they were afraid I’d be stopped. They warned me I had to operate in secret.”

  “Perhaps the agents they sent didn’t remember their mission,” Thorn speculated. “Perhaps the process of sending someone back in time erases memory.”

  “Is it just women?” Max asked.

  “No. There were five men before me.”

  “Why’d they choose you?” Jason asked.

  She dipped her head, then gave him a direct look. “I was trained as a guard in one of the residential complexes. I was good at my job. But I got into trouble. There was a man who…kept trying to do things with me that were…forbidden. I didn’t like him, but I couldn’t get away from him.” She stopped, looked down at her hands. “It’s hard for me to talk about…private things. We’re…I guess you’d call us puritanical.” She looked at Max, and he silently told her that anything she said now was okay.

  “We were seen together and arrested,” she said softly, then spoke more strongly. “I had a choice. I could go to one of the colonies where they’re trying to expand our territory or I could accept this mission. The colonies are not a good place to live. So I said I would come here. When they started training me, I wanted to back out, but I couldn’t. There was a lot of preparation. I learned so much about your world. I couldn’t believe it all.”

  “Like what?” Max asked.

  “They told me that children play games like hide-and-seek. And football. They told me mothers and fathers pick each other. That they live together. Then you told me some of those things, Max. I wanted to hear as much about it as I could.”

  Max squeezed her hand. He saw that her eyes were watering. He couldn’t imagine what she’d been through in her life. In her training. In coming here.

  “You need to rest now,” he said. “We’ll talk about the best way to get you into Sea Kingdom and how to protect you when you’re there. I promise we’ll get Carpenter.”

  She nodde
d, and he was pretty sure she believed him.

  “There’s one more thing I need to say,” she whispered. “I had another name where I came from. But Max called me Annie. I’d like to keep that name now, if that’s okay.”

  Max’s heart contracted. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I don’t think anyone will object to that.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bert Trainer leaned against the trunk of a palm tree in a little park near the center of Sea Kingdom. From the shade, he watched the laughing, smiling people walk past him on the blacktop path.

  He had a dull headache and he felt sick to his stomach, even with a double dose of antacids. But he was excited, too. After all these years, it was finally going to happen. His destiny was here. He had come to accept that. And he knew that he had to find Annie Oakland. Or whatever her name was.

  His hand wasn’t quite steady as he fingered the bulky knapsack he’d brought. Stroking the fabric made him feel better. He’d packed carefully and gotten into the park with the equipment he thought he’d need. But he didn’t know how anything was going to turn out.

  ANNIE STOOD STILL for a moment, looking around at the crowd that surged through Sea Kingdom. As soon as she had been fit to travel, she and twenty Light Street–Randolph Security volunteers had flown from Maryland to Florida. This time she’d been prepared for the experience of being high above the ground.

  On the trip down, they’d looked at videos of the theme park and made plans. Then they’d driven immediately to the park to familiarize themselves with the layout. After that, they’d gone to a nearby hotel for a planning meeting. They were as prepared as they could be, in so short a time.

  Under protest, Katie had given Annie a stimulant. Still, Annie felt barely competent to carry out her assignment as she walked through the vast park. The governor was giving his speech in about an hour. And Charles Carpenter was here, too. Her awareness of him threatened to choke off her breath.

  She felt as if she was drowning out in the open air, surrounded by families with laughing children.