Sick pe-1

by Brett Battles

  “This is too obvious,” Tamara said. “They find us in here for sure.”

  “Trust me. They won’t.”

  Bobby climbed up on his own, then Tamara reluctantly took Chavez’s hand. Once she was on board, he went to the front of the cargo area and touched two of the screws holding the panels in place. A small section of the wall popped open about a quarter inch. He put his fingers into the gap, then pulled it all the way open like a door.

  Inside was a three-foot-wide space that ran the width of the truck.

  “It’s not a ton of room, but you’ll be safe. The walls are insulated. Still, I wouldn’t talk very much. There’s food and water, and a pot in case you need to relieve yourself.”

  “How long do you think we’ll be in there?” Bobby asked, surprised.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Whose truck is this?” Tamara asked. “I don’t remember it from the roadblock.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s safe. Once you’re inside, there’s a latch. Close that and no one can open it from out here. Don’t undo it until you hear someone knock three times like this.” He tapped lightly against the metal, knock-knock, then paused a second before adding the final knock. He looked out the open end of the truck as if he’d heard something. “I know you have questions, but now’s not the time. Just get in.”

  Bobby immediately went inside.

  Tamara looked Peter in the eyes. “You’re not lying to us, right?” she asked, already knowing he wasn’t.

  “I’m not.”

  “And Joe is dead?”

  He nodded. “Yes. I’m sorry. Now get in quickly.Please.”

  She took a breath and passed through the opening, then watched with a nightmarish sense of the unreal as Peter closed the door behind her.

  42

  In the dead of night, the landscape of Eastern Oregon didn’t look much different than that of the Mojave Desert surrounding Barker Flats. Perhaps it had a bit more scrub covering the ground, but like the Mojave, neither the flatlands nor the nearby mountains had any trees.

  Chloe had done well, and had already saved them an hour by the time Ash took over driving again. Their destination was approximately fifty miles north of the Nevada border, in the southeast corner of the state. That was, of course, if Olivia had told them the truth.

  What buildings they’d seen so far had been few and far between. There were stretches where it seemed as if this part of the country had either been abandoned or never claimed in the first place. None of it served to boost Ash’s confidence.

  “Should be five-point-two more miles,” Chloe said, her gaze never leaving the road.

  Ash glanced at the odometer. She was right. “How do you do that?”

  She shrugged. “It’s just the way my mind works, I guess.”

  They drove another tenth of a mile before he asked, “Do you think you could do that before? When you still had your memories?”

  “I have no idea.”

  More silence. “Do you think they did that to you?”

  “Can we not talk about this?” she asked, obviously uncomfortable.

  “Sorry.”

  He looked over at her, but she had her back partially turned to him, her eyes staring out the side window. He started to say something else, but decided it was best to leave it alone. Besides, they were closing in on NB7, and he needed to focus so that he didn’t miss anything.

  According to Olivia, just ahead they would find a road that led to the West.

  “It’s more asphalt than dirt,” she had said. “But not by much.”

  At the forty-nine-mile mark, Ash started scanning the left side of the road in case Chloe’s mileage estimate had been wrong, but it hadn’t been. The road was right where she said it would be. It had the forgotten look of having been abandoned to the elements long ago, as if its construction had been well intended, but its promise never fulfilled. Given the fact that it was literally in the middle of nowhere, Ash wondered why it had been built at all.

  Even if Olivia had not cautioned them that the road would be watched, Ash would have still kept driving by just like he was doing. She had told them their only chance was if they hiked in. He didn’t like the idea of following her instructions precisely, but there didn’t seem to be much of a choice.

  He drove on for another half mile, then pulled the car to the side of the road. In the wide open landscape, there was really no place to hide the vehicle.

  As he turned off the engine, he looked at Chloe. “Stay with the car.”

  “No way.”

  “I want to make sure it’s still here when I get back with my kids.”

  She looked outside, scanning both ways down the road. There were no other headlights in sight. “Where would it go?”

  “Just stay here.”

  He got out and circled around to the trunk. From the weapons case, he removed another gun, filled its mag, then set it on the floor of the trunk. He grabbed his spare mags and the container of little bangs, and distributed them between his jeans and his jacket. Picking up the spare pistol, he shut the trunk, then walked around and knocked on the passenger window.

  Chloe stared at him for a moment, then lowered it.

  “Here,” he said, handing the SIG to her. “Just in case.”

  She pulled back as if it might bite her, but then reluctantly took it.

  “You know how to fire that?” he asked.

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  He nodded, then said, “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Her only response was to roll the window back up.

  He checked both ways before he crossed the empty highway, then angled into the desert on the other side, paralleling the access road that was supposedly being watched. Olivia said NB7 was about a mile and a half in, on the side of the road Ash was currently on.

  His eyes quickly adjusted to the moonless night as he made his way through the scrub-covered land. At one point he thought he heard something in the brush. He paused, listening, but the sound didn’t return. He decided it was rabbit, perhaps, or whatever other types of animals might choose to live in this nothingness.

  As he passed the mile mark, his jaw tensed. Mike had warned him to be careful about believing anything Olivia said. Maybe this was just a lie. Maybe he was the only thing out here. Maybe Josie and Brandon were hundreds of miles away, and would die because he had chosen to follow the directions of an obviously deranged woman locked up in a secret prison.

  If that turned out to be the case, he would go back to the Bluff and kill her.

  He slowed his pace. If NB7 was here, he had to be close. Better to sneak up on it than to stumble.

  Again, he heard something in the brush. It came from behind him, maybe thirty yards. He crouched down, then looked back the way he’d come, letting his eyes focus on nothing in particular.

  There. Just off to the right of the line he’d been following, a shadow hovering above the brush and moving in his direction.

  A lookout,he thought.If he’s already seen me, I’m done.

  If that was the case, half a dozen others were probably closing in on him from different directions, and he was going to get taken down before he even got to NB7.

  Should he run? Stay where he was? Or what?

  He looked at the shadow again. It had moved to about forty feet away, then stopped. Carefully, he turned, scanning around, looking for others, but the only thing he could see was more brush. If there was anyone else out there, they had to be lying on the ground.

  If he’d had time to play games, he would have kept moving to see if the shadow was really following him. But time was something he didn’t have.

  He pulled out his gun, and made a beeline straight for the shadow. Before he’d even gone halfway, it disappeared. Not moved to the right or the left, or any other direction, just disappeared. But he didn’t slow until he was within a few feet of where it had been.

  He was sure whoever it was had dropped to the ground, blending in with the b
rush, but there was no one there. He swung his gun around, angling it toward the ground, knowing the person had to be close.

  “I could have killed you if I wanted to.”

  He whipped around. Standing directly behind him, her gun at her side, was Chloe.

  “I told you to stay with the car,” he whispered.

  “And I never said I would. You need me,” she whispered back.

  “I don’t need you. I can do this myself. Now just go back.”

  He turned and started walking in the direction he’d been headed. After only a couple of seconds, he could hear her following him.

  “Chloe, it’s not safe,” he said, turning back.

  “And going into the psych hospital earlier was?”

  “That was different. You were the one who knew the layout. I had no choice. But you don’t know this place. I’m not going to put you in a position where you might get hurt.”

  “Not your decision,” she said. “I’m here, and I’m coming with you. Now let’s go, unless you want to stand here all night arguing.”

  Short of carrying her back to the car and locking her in the trunk, he saw there was nothing he could do to stop her.

  “Okay,” he said. “But you do everything I say.”

  He took her silence for assent, though deep down, he knew it wasn’t.

  For the next five minutes, his concerns that Olivia had been lying continued to grow. There was nothing but dirt and brush. No buildings at all.

  “What’s that?” Chloe whispered a couple minutes later.

  She was still behind him, so he had to look back to see what she was talking about. She pointed twenty degrees to their right. It took him a moment, but then he saw it, too.

  Just ahead, the terrain dipped into a shallow wash, then rose on the other side, perhaps not high enough to be called a hill, but definitely higher than this side of the wash. At the very top was a post or, maybe, the trunk of a small tree. It appeared to be less than a half-foot in diameter, and stood two feet above the brush.

  “There’s another one,” Chloe said. “About twenty feet to the left.”

  She was right. After that, it was easy to pick out others. They spotted seven in all, stretching in what looked like a line blocking their path.

  “A fence?” she suggested.

  “Seems kind of low.”

  They walked through the wash, then up the embankment, finally stopping ten feet short of the first post Chloe had seen. Though it was hard to judge color in the darkness, Ash got the sense the pole had been painted to blend in with its surroundings. Why? There didn’t appear to be anything attached to it, or anything sitting on the flat top. It was just…a post.

  Chloe pulled out her flashlight and flicked it on.

  “Turn that off. Someone will see it,” he whispered.

  “Anyone who can see this probably watched us walk up the hill,” she told him, then pointed the light at the post.

  Instead of wood, it appeared to be fabricated out of a plastic-like material. Near the top, a thin slot ran all the way around the post with what looked like curved, tinted glass covering it.

  “Any idea what this is?” he asked.

  “Motion sensor?”

  “Could be,” he said. “Let’s see how far it goes.”

  They went approximately seventy-five feet to the right before the row of posts took a sharp left turn. As they followed the new section, the hill fell away and they were on level ground again. Three hundred feet this time, then another turn to the left.

  They’d gone twenty feet down this third part when Chloe touched Ash’s arm.

  “There it is,” she said.

  Ash had seen it, too.

  Land had been carved out of the hill across from them and leveled off. Built exactly in the center of this area was a one-story, commercial-style building with no visible windows. On a large concrete slab next to it were several satellite dishes.

  Exactly how Olivia had described NB7.

  From their current angle, they could only see the back and west side of the building. There were no cars visible, but given the helicopter that sat on another concrete pad closer to the front of the building, maybe cars weren’t necessary. The aircraft was big enough to probably carry up to ten people, not including the crew.

  There was a hundred feet between the line of posts and the building, or, as Ash saw it, a hundred feet between him and his children. They had to be there. It was the only possibility. To think otherwise would be pointless.

  He continued down, following the odd-looking fence until he could see the front of the building. There were still no windows, but there was a door, and in front of it sat two cars.

  He was contemplating walking all the way around to get a look at the east side of the building, the only part they hadn’t seen, when two people stepped out the door.

  “Get down, get down,” he whispered as he crouched into the brush.

  They watched the two men walk over to one of the sedans, get in, then drive toward the front of the property. Along that end was a traditional fence with a gate across the entrance road that opened automatically as the car neared. A few seconds later, the vehicle was heading down the half-asphalt, half-dirt road.

  That was a problem.

  Figure a mile and a half on a bad road would take them two to three minutes tops to reach the highway. If they turned right, no problem, but if they turned left, once they drove another thirty seconds, they’d pass Ash’s car parked suspiciously off the side of the road.

  So, two and a half minutes plus the time it took to call back to the building, and those inside would know someone was there. He and Chloe had to move before then.

  He was pretty sure the posts were motion detectors, perhaps triggered when something passed between them. But while breaking their invisible beam would betray his and Chloe’s presence, it would come as a surprise to those inside, and they would be on the defensive as opposed to being on the hunt because they’d been warned by their friends in the car.

  A hundred feet. In college, Ash could run the forty-yard dash in four-point-seven seconds. He’d been younger then, and in slightly better shape, but he thought he could still do it in five and a half. And forty yards would actually get him all the way to the front door. Even if there wasn’t any kind of delay before the alarm went off, he should still be able to get there before anyone inside had the time to react.

  “How fast can you run?” he asked Chloe.

  “Fast enough.”

  “Then that’s what we’re going to do.”

  He moved over to the imaginary line of the fence.

  “Wait,” she said. “What’s the plan?”

  “The plan? Get my kids back.”

  He put his head down, then started to run.

  43

  Their new room wasn’t that much different than their old one. There were two beds and a bathroom, just like before. The only difference this time was that the door was locked.

  Brandon knew the people watching over them had done something to put him and Josie to sleep before they switched rooms, but he had no idea why. The thought that the room they were now in was in an entirely different building in an entirely different state hadn’t even crossed his mind. He thought they were still on his dad’s base, just down the hall from the room they’d been in before.

  His biggest concern at the moment was his sister. She had yet to wake up. He, on the other hand, had been awake for at least a couple hours, maybe even more.

  The same guy who’d been bringing them food from the beginning had brought in dinner a while ago. He was the nice one, the guy who always smiled, and seemed to really care about them.

  When Brandon asked him if he knew why Josie was still asleep, the man had said, “Because she’s still getting over her illness.”

  That only made Brandon more worried. What if she was getting sick again? That happened sometimes, didn’t it? He was sure he’d heard that before. Would she be even sicker this time? Would she e
ven…die?

  Thinking that terrified him. His mom and dad were already gone. What was he going to do if Josie wasn’t around, either? He’d have no one. No one at all.

  He sat on the edge of her bed, wiping her head with a damp towel from the bathroom. He didn’t think she had a fever, but he wanted to make sure it stayed that way.

  “It’s okay, Josie. I’m here.”

  Ten minutes later, he fell asleep beside to her.

  * * *

  NB7 was not considered a high-priority location for project security. Its isolation was believed to be its best defense. That didn’t mean there wasn’t a security staff on hand, but it did mean other resources such as constant satellite observation were considered unnecessary. It was, by design after all, mainly a storage and backup shelter facility.

  What additional security the building did have consisted of a state-of-the-art motion sensor grid surrounding the perimeter, video surveillance along the road that led to the property, and a car recognition system set up on the highway.

  The way this last item worked was that cars traveling on the highway would trip an electronic beam twelve miles either to the South or to the North. This would trigger a hidden camera to take a picture of the car and its license plate, then, in a completely automated process, determine the make, model and year of the car. The vehicle would then be checked off when it crossed the opposite electronic eye on its way out of the area. There was leeway built in to the system to account for slower drivers, and for those who might stop to take a few pictures — something that happened more often than those at NB7 may have expected. But once these items were taken into consideration, if a car failed to trip the second beam in the allotted time frame, an alarm would be activated, and a team would be sent out to check.

  Just such an alarm went off at 12:58 a.m. for a 2009 Honda Accord with Florida license plates. It was probably nothing, the head of security thought. He bet the driver had just pulled to the side of the road to take a nap. That had happened, too.

  Still, protocol was to dispatch a team.