Dream Sky

by Brett Battles

  He was surprised, but didn’t think he had time to ask how she knew. “Yeah.”

  “Good to meet you, Ben. I’m Nyla. Show me where these others are.”

  __________

  TEAMS B AND C each reported successful entry into the stadium. All three teams made their way into the interior and headed toward the home-plate end of the structure.

  Here and there they encountered sporadic gunfire, but most of the shooters appeared to have very little idea about what they were doing and were subdued with little effort.

  “Gabriel?” Anton Helms’s voice said over the radio as the teams did a final sweep.

  “Go for Gabriel.”

  “Something here you need to see.”

  “Where are you?”

  Following Helms’s directions, Gabriel made his way to a set of rooms that appeared to have been converted into a medical facility. Helms and two others were standing by a windowed door.

  “So?” Gabriel said.

  “Over here.”

  Gabriel walked over and looked through the window. A girl who couldn’t have been much more than eighteen was standing a few feet inside, staring back with fear in her eyes.

  “Please, let me out,” she said, her voice coming out of an intercom on the wall. “Please.”

  Gabriel glanced at Helms. “What’s going on?”

  Helms shrugged. “We just found her like this. Said they stuck her in here earlier today after giving her an inoculation.”

  “Double inoculation,” the girl corrected.

  “Right, double. Apparently they told her she had to wait twenty-four hours to make sure it took.”

  “Uh, and why would that be?” Gabriel asked.

  Helms turned off the intercom and motioned for Gabriel to follow him. About ten feet over was a set of valves mounted on the wall, with one set of hoses leading to the door of the room the man was in, and another set leading to several metal tanks.

  He touched the first. “This one’s on and hooked up to a couple of tanks marked O2.” He skipped the two middle ones and pointed at the fourth. “This one? Well, come here.”

  He traced the hose back to a single tank. On the outside was stenciled KV-27a.

  Gabriel gaped. They’d all heard the code before. It was Project Eden’s designation for the Sage Flu virus.

  “They’re pumping virus into her room?” he asked.

  “Pumped,” Helms corrected him. He easily picked up the tank with two fingers under the valve. “It’s empty.”

  Gabriel shot a look back at the room. “Why?”

  “You got me.”

  They walked back over.

  “Can you at least tell me what’s going on?” the girl pleaded.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Gabriel said, hoping that was true. “The people who were running this place are no longer in charge.”

  Her eyes widened. “Oh, God. We were right, weren’t we?”

  “Right about what?”

  “Some of the others and I were starting to think the doctors and guards weren’t who they claimed to be. And that they didn’t really plan on helping us.”

  “No, ma’am, they didn’t.”

  “Are you the UN?”

  “The UN died with everyone else.”

  “Then who are you?”

  “We’re the ones who are going to figure out how to keep you alive.”

  __________

  PAX AND MARTINA heard the sound of running steps just inside the stadium, and then voices. A few seconds later something pounded against the fence and a head poked over the top.

  “Jilly?” Martina said.

  The girl looked down. “Martina?” She turned so she could glance back on the other side. “Martina’s here!”

  Jilly swung over the top and dropped down. She hugged Martina so tight it hurt, but neither seemed to care.

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” Jilly said. “You came for us!”

  Four more came over, including a man Martina didn’t know, but the others were from her old softball team. She and Valerie even hugged, whatever problems between them forgotten for now or maybe forever.

  When the last person dropped down, Martina stared expectantly at the top of the wall. “Where’s Ben? I saw him. He’s with you, isn’t he?” She moved up to the fence and yelled, “Ben!”

  “He went back to the enclosure with that woman,” Jilly said.

  “What woman?”

  “The one with the gun. I thought she was with you.”

  “Nyla?”

  Jilly shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Why would he go back?”

  “There were others locked up with us,” Jilly said. “And Ruby…they took her somewhere early today.”

  “All right,” Pax said. “We’re not safe here. I want you all to head across the parking lot to those trees over there and wait. Martina can show you where.”

  “I am not going anywhere,” Martina told him.

  He frowned but said, “Okay. The rest of you go. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

  “If Martina’s staying, we’re staying,” Jilly said.

  “Definitely,” Valerie agreed.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Pax said. “Did you hear those gunshots?”

  “We saw two people killed in front of us,” Jilly said. “So, yeah, we heard them. And we’re staying.”

  It was another four minutes before they heard people arriving on the other side again.

  “Stand back!” Nyla yelled.

  Everyone moved away from the fence.

  A rifle blasted and the fence shuddered. There was the rattle of a chain, and then a gate a few feet away swung open.

  The rest of the survivors swarmed out.

  And at the very end came Nyla and Ben.

  Martina rushed forward and threw her arms around him. At first he didn’t seem to realize who she was. He pushed her back enough so he could take a look, and then his breath caught in his throat.

  Their kiss was infused with relief and joy and longing.

  It didn’t matter what happened now.

  She had found him.

  January 8th

  World Population

  701,217,009

  35

  JAIPUR, INDIA

  11:37 AM IST

  “I SEE HIM. I see him,” Darshana said over the radio.

  Sanjay looked west toward the building she was on, though he couldn’t see her from where he was. “What’s he doing?” he asked.

  “Talking to another man. It looks like they are walking back to the car.”

  “This other man, what does he look like?”

  “Tall. Maybe forty. Short hair.”

  “European or Indian?”

  “European.”

  Sanjay frowned. Not Director Mahajan. At least they still had eyes on van Assen.

  “Kusum, are you ready?” he asked.

  “Ready,” she responded.

  Two hours earlier, van Assen had shown up at the survival station, alone in a car. Hopefully his next stop would be NB551. Sanjay and Kusum were both waiting on motorcycles, ready to take up pursuit.

  “Van Assen’s getting in the car,” Darshana said.

  “The other man going with him?”

  “No. He’s alone.” Several seconds, then, “He’s leaving. Turning…east.”

  Kusum’s route.

  “I’ll catch up,” Sanjay said. He kicked his bike to life.

  The people in America had called early that morning with the request for him and his friends to prepare to create some chaos in Jaipur. Since there were only the three of them, it was understood the chaos wouldn’t be much, but they were told whatever they could do would help.

  To that end, the first thing they’d done that morning was locate a fireworks factory on the edge of town, where they obtained several small barrels of powder and reels of fuses. They hid the kegs around the perimeter of the station, ganging fuses so several could be lit at the same time. Darshana was stayi
ng behind so that if the call to act came while he and Kusum were following van Assen, Darshana could light them up. The makeshift bombs wouldn’t do much damage, but they would be unnerving.

  Sanjay caught up to Kusum five minutes later on the street paralleling the one van Assen was using.

  “Keep on him,” he told her over the radio. “Tell me every time he turns. I am going ahead.”

  “To where?”

  “I have an idea. Just do not lose him.”

  Sanjay twisted the accelerator and raced away. He didn’t want to share his plan with her, knowing she would try to talk him out of it, but if it worked, they might be able to provide the Americans with more than the distraction from a few barrels of gunpowder.

  Using Kusum’s directional information, he tried to stay at least two blocks ahead of van Assen. One time he screwed up and fell behind, but quickly made up the distance. Finally, when it seemed the Dutchman was going in one steady direction, Sanjay increased his distance to four blocks, then five, then six.

  As they neared what appeared to be a warehouse district, he thought they must be getting close to van Assen’s destination, so he decreased his speed.

  Two streets down and to the left, he saw it. Thankfully, it was far enough away that the guard at the gate didn’t see him. Even if there wasn’t a guard there, he would have pegged the place for a base. The array of satellite dishes and antennas on the roof was incongruous with the rest of the buildings in the area, and while the structure itself appeared appropriately worn, he would swear it was designed to look that way.

  He turned the bike around. “Where are you?” he asked.

  Kusum gave him a location that was only two and a half blocks away. He moved up to the end of the street and laid his bike down in the middle of the road, making it impossible to drive around it. Then he hid in the shadows of the building on the corner.

  Twenty seconds later, van Assen’s car appeared on the road. When it neared the bike, it slowed. Van Assen had two choices: get out of the car to move the bike, or back up to use a different street. Sanjay wasn’t about to leave things to chance.

  A second after the car stopped, he sprinted toward it, and was only a few meters away when the driver’s door started to open.

  Perfect.

  Sanjay leapt forward and grabbed the door. Van Assen yelped in surprise.

  “Good morning, Mr. van Assen,” Sanjay said. “So nice to see you again.”

  MADRID, SPAIN

  8:08 AM CET (CENTRAL EUROPEAN TIME)

  LALO VEGA SILENTLY worked his way around the Madrid survival station, checking on each of his people.

  He sure as hell hoped this wouldn’t be for nothing. Putting all his people on the line like this felt like a disaster in the making. But the Resistance leadership back in America assured him his team wouldn’t be the only ones out tonight. It was a worldwide effort, they had said. The big push.

  Despite his concerns, he put on a brave face as he made sure everyone was set.

  “Any time now,” he told them. “Wait for my word.”

  CAIRO, EGYPT

  9:08 AM EET (EASTERN EUROPEAN TIME)

  THIS WAS GOING to be something to see, Raheem Bahar thought with a smile. The Cairo survival station would not know what had hit them.

  During the first days of the epidemic, Rahim and his people had cleaned out five army ammo depots, moving the munitions to a centralized location for later use.

  When the request from Resistance headquarters had come through, he knew the time had come.

  They had to temper their initial plan for fear of harming the survivors in the detention areas, but their effort would still pack more than a simple punch. Because Rahim had no intention of only putting a scare into Project Eden personnel at the station.

  He and his people would destroy them.

  GUANGZHOU, CHINA

  2:09 PM CHINA STANDARD TIME

  “YOU GOING TO be all right?” Pieter Dombrovsky asked.

  Megan Zhang nodded. “I’ll be fine.”

  Whether she would be or not didn’t matter. The call would come soon and they would go into action, despite her nerves.

  She had always known that by joining the Resistance, there was a good chance she’d be involved in a mission like this. She had done what she could to lessen the potential trauma, and had volunteered for the Guangzhou contingent so that she wouldn’t be faced with seeing the death of anyone she knew back in Hong Kong.

  Then stupid Pieter had volunteered to come with her. Now she had to worry about him.

  She tightened her grip on her rifle, hoping to quell her shakes.

  Pieter must have noticed, because he pried one of her hands loose and put it in his. “No one will see us up here,” he told her. “We’ll set off the charges, fire off a few shots, and before you know it, it’ll be over.”

  Unable to help herself, she flung her hand around the back of his head and pulled his lips to hers, kissing him for the first time ever.

  “Don’t you dare die on me,” she whispered.

  “I won’t if you won’t.”

  “Deal.”

  TOKYO, JAPAN

  3:09 PM JST (JAPAN STANDARD TIME)

  THE CHOICE OF the location for the Tokyo survival station had been a poor one on Project Eden’s part. To be fair, it was impossible for anyone to know about all the tunnels that ran under the city, whether new or long abandoned.

  It was one of the forgotten tunnels that would be the station’s downfall, at least if Toshiko Nagawa had anything to do with it. The tunnels allowed her team to get right under the facility and place remotely detonated explosives below the administration building.

  Now all she had to do was press a button when the call came, then walk in and free the detainees.

  As her college roommate back at Berkeley used to say: Done and done.

  36

  NB016, NEW YORK CITY

  1:10 AM EST

  CELESTE JOHNSON STOOD in the back of the comm room, eyes narrow. “Well?” she asked.

  “Still nothing, ma’am,” the comm operator said.

  Less than an hour earlier, they had received a message from the Los Angeles survival station that said a large number of survivors had shown up. L.A. was supposed to have reported in with a follow-up thirty minutes ago, but none had come, and all subsequent attempts to reach the station had gone unanswered.

  Chicago was another matter altogether. While the station was still in contact with New York, it had been attacked in a coordinated effort to free a group of survivors scheduled for elimination. One of those in the attack had apparently been a Project Eden technician, a traitor within their organization. He was killed as he led the survivors out of the facility, but others on the outside had used explosives and gunfire to create diversions that allowed the prisoners to get away.

  Of course, neither event was the first time a station had experienced difficulties. There had been minor flare-ups here and there, and, most spectacularly, the escape at the Mumbai station that had necessitated the closure of that facility.

  Celeste was tempted to send out a general warning, but she wouldn’t allow herself to imagine either event as something significant. She decided that in the morning, she would send a team to Chicago to find the troublemakers and destroy them.

  As for Los Angeles…

  “Keep trying,” she instructed the operator.

  37

  EVERTON, VERMONT

  1:10 AM EST

  “WE HAVE TWENTY-NINE locations ready to go,” Crystal said over the phone. “A few won’t be much more than window dressing, but the others should more substantial. Just waiting for your go.”

  “Very soon,” Ash said. “Don’t stray too far away.”

  “Glued to my chair.”

  Ash hung up and walked back over to the others. “So?”

  Without looking back, Bobby Lion said, “Give me a few more seconds.”

  They were in a hollow behind some rocks on a hill a quarter mile ea
st of the town. Bobby and the people he’d arrived with had set up a monitoring station with four five-inch screens sitting on a crack in one of the boulders. They were being fed by cameras placed around the town, and all monitors were in night-vision mode.

  Right around midnight, not long before Ash, Chloe, and their group had arrived, Bobby had spotted someone walking through the streets. At first he had thought it was one of the guards he’d already identified, but all four were still in place. He tracked the silhouette all the way to the location of guard number three, where some kind of conversation occurred. The new arrival apparently took over guard duty, while the man he replaced headed through town the way the other man had come.

  Unfortunately, at that point, only four cameras had been up and running, and Bobby had lost the guard as the man reached the north end of the village. Since then, Bobby had been trying to figure out where the guy went. One of the team members had been sent out with a camera and was moving around the town at Bobby’s direction, trying to pick up the guard’s footprints in the snow.

  When Ash had gone to take Crystal’s call, Bobby had traced the path through several streets but still had no end point.

  “I need you to move fifty feet to your left,” Bobby said into his radio. “Then aim along that road leading out of town….Yeah, the one that dead-ends.”

  Ash leaned over Bobby’s shoulder as the feed in monitor five repositioned. The road in question was a flat expanse covered with snow.

  “Zoom in,” Bobby instructed. “Slowly. Eastern edge.”

  The picture darkened as it pushed in, the tighter angle cutting down on the amount of ambient light the lens could pull in.

  “Stop,” Bobby said. “There.” Bobby pointed at the monitor.

  Along the edge of the road was a depression in the snow, almost a trough. It appeared to be…

  “A path?” Ash asked.

  Bobby grinned. “That’s what it looks like to me.” He switched back to his mic. “Marcos, you see that dark line on the edge of the road?…Right, that one. Follow it out. Let’s see where it goes.”