The produce sprayers that had been installed in hundreds of grocery stores across North America and at a few chains in Europe would, Perez surmised, prove to be less effective. While they were working fine, the panic was keeping most people at home, and many of the markets had closed.
On the success side was the Pishon Chem malaria project. He’d been concerned that the fear created by the shipping containers might cause some of the nations involved to call off the spraying, but it had done just the opposite. Many governments, he realized, were hoping that the “miracle” formula would not only kill malaria-bearing mosquitoes, but also neutralize whatever the shipping containers were belching out.
Perez couldn’t help but allow himself a smile. If the virus worked as it was supposed to, and with the coverage they’d been able to achieve so far, the Project’s planned mop-up of survivors might be scaled back.
With everything going well, Perez turned to consolidating his power. There was no question that the only way the Project would truly succeed was to have a single leader—him. The committee would no longer be necessary. However, that didn’t mean a committee couldn’t be useful, perhaps one to help guide policy, though in reality, he would be the one steering everything.
Easily doable. In fact, most of the current committee members would be fine additions to the new one. Dr. Lassiter would be a pushover, and Perez was confident he could make Tolliver and Halverson see things his way, too.
Nakamura, on the other hand, was a problem.
Perez had met people like her before. They liked to be part of the in-crowd, and would feverishly defend their exclusivity whether it was a logical move or not. They were the kind of people who always thought they knew better though they seldom did.
The kind of people who would never be helpful to the cause.
How Nakamura had reached the position she had, he didn’t know. In his opinion, someone had made a mistake, and as a revamped Project Eden set about creating the new world, there would be no room for mistakes.
Perhaps if she had been located in Europe or Asia, he’d have given her a pass—for a little while, anyway—but the fact that she was at NB89 near Seattle made dealing with the situation so much easier.
He thought it was important to not just delegate the task to someone else, but to also be a part of it. After all, in his past life—the life that had ended when Bluebird fell out of contact—he had been the one sent out to handle these kinds of issues.
The phone rang right on time.
“Yes?”
“Your conference call is ready, Mr. Perez,” Claudia said.
“Thank you.”
He hung up and turned to his computer. A moment later he was looking at Patricia Nakamura sitting smugly in her office.
“Mr. Perez, I’m not sure what you want to discuss, but it seems to me anything we need to talk about should be done in one of our committee meetings.”
“Of course it would seem that way to you.”
“Excuse me?”
“You perceive the world through an unfortunate filter.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think we’re done here.”
She reached for her keyboard to cut off the call, and hit the appropriate key, but, as Perez knew would happen, their connection remained live.
“What’s wrong with this?” she said to herself.
She hit the keyboard over and over but nothing happened.
Perez touched the cell phone sitting on his desk. On it was a prewritten text:
NOW
He hit SEND.
“Be careful you don’t break that,” he said.
“Shut up,” she told him.
She reached for the monitor, going for the button that would turn off the screen. Once more, she was stymied.
Frustrated, she stood up and leaned toward the monitor, her head moving out of sight as she undoubtedly searched for the power cord.
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said.
“Try to stop me,” she shot back.
It was the perfect cue, and though the door didn’t open for another couple of seconds, it worked well enough.
She looked up. “Who are you?”
Sims walked in with two of his team behind him.
“Ma’am, please have a seat,” he said.
“What is this? What’s going on?” Nakamura looked back at the monitor. “This is your doing, isn’t it? Tell these men to leave. They have no right to be here.”
“Actually, you’re the one without any rights now,” Perez said.
One of Sims’s men pushed Nakamura back into her chair.
“Hey!” she yelled. She started to get back up, but changed her mind and reached for the phone on her desk. She punched in a number before she raised the receiver to her ear. When she did, she looked at the monitor again. “Dr. Lassiter will deal with you.”
Perez gave her a halfhearted smile.
After a moment, she looked at the phone, used her finger to disconnect the call, and listened again. The anger on her face intensified. “It’s not working! What did you do to it?”
Perez leaned forward. “Ms. Nakamura, the Project thanks you for your service, but regrets to inform you that you are no longer necessary to its future success.”
“The Project thanks me?” While there was still anger in her voice, it was now tinged with fear. “You’re not the Project. You don’t get to make that kind of decision.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. I am the Project, and your failure to realize that is the reason my men are there now. But know this. When the trigger is pulled—”
“Wait! No!” she blurted out, her voice full of fear and desperation.
“—it’s not being pulled by the man there with you. It’s being pulled by me.”
“Mr. Perez, I…I’m sorry. I didn’t understand the sit—”
“That’s right. You didn’t.”
Perez nodded once. Behind Nakamura, Sims raised his gun, put it to the back of her head, and removed her from the Project.
21
RIDGECREST, CALIFORNIA
8:20 AM PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
SOMEONE WAS SHAKING Martina’s shoulder.
With a groan, she tried to turn away. It was much too early, she was sure of it. By the time she’d gotten home and fallen asleep the night before, it was after two in the morning. She had promised herself she really would sleep as late as possible today, noon if she could manage it.
“Martina, come on. Wake up.”
She opened her eyes, surprised. Her father was standing over her. He never woke her up.
“What’s going on?” she asked, her voice still full of sleep.
“Get up, get dressed, then come downstairs.”
She glanced at the clock by her bed and groaned. She had barely slept six hours. “Did I forget something? Are we supposed to be somewhere?”
But her father was already heading out the door. “Just get ready and come down.” With that, he was gone.
She sat up and blinked several times, trying to shake the sleep from her system. As she swung her legs off the bed, she noticed that several drawers of her dresser were open. She hadn’t left them that way the night before. When she got up and walked over to shut them, she was surprised to see they were empty.
What the hell?
She checked the other drawers. Several pairs of pants were missing, and her sweaters, too. Then she noticed that someone had laid some clothes out for her on her desk chair.
More confused than ever, she pulled them on and hurried downstairs to find out what was up.
A cold wind was blowing in through the open front door. Out the living room window she could see her father and brother over near the garage, putting something in the trunk of the car. Above them, high gray clouds dimmed the day.
Something banged in the kitchen.
“Mom?”
Martina stepped off the last tread of the staircase onto the cold tile floor and walked to the back of the house
.
Her mother was near the kitchen sink. On the counter in front of her were boxes and packages of food. It looked to Martina like everything from inside the cabinets had been pulled down. Her mother was going through it all, sorting them into groups.
“Mom, what’s going on?”
Her mother jerked around with a start. “Oh, Martina. I didn’t hear you come down.” She attempted to give her daughter a smile, but quickly gave up. Her eyes strayed down to Martina’s feet. “Where are your shoes?”
“Where I left them when I took them off last night,” Martina said, as if it should have been obvious.
“Well, hurry and put them on.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Just do it!” her mother said sharply.
Martina took a step back, surprised by the intensity of her mother’s tone. “Okay. No problem.”
Her mother closed her eyes for a moment. “I’m sorry. Please, just…put them on, okay?”
“Sure. I’m putting them on.”
Martina retrieved her shoes from the entryway, slipped her feet inside, and laced them up. From a peg by the door, she grabbed her zip-up hoodie and headed outside.
Her dad and brother were still at the back of the car. They had lowered the hood of the trunk, but it looked like there was too much inside for it to close all the way.
“Donny, grab me some rope,” her father said.
Her brother ran into the garage.
“Dad, would you please tell me what’s going on?” Martina said.
Her father glanced over. “Good, you’re dressed. There are some water jugs in the garage. Can you put them in the backseat for me?”
“Dad!”
He looked at her again, and finally seemed to register her earlier question. “Did you see the TV?”
“The TV?” She shook her head. “It was off.”
He stepped over to her and put his hands on her arms. “I don’t want you to panic.”
“You mean like you guys already seem to be doing?”
“The shipping containers they’ve been finding all over the place? The rumor is it’s some kind of biological attack.”
“What?” She pulled away from him, her mind assaulted by memories of the outbreak that had almost killed her. That, too, had been a biological attack.
“I said, don’t panic.”
“What is it? Who did it? Do they even know for sure?” The questions jumped out rapid fire.
“The government’s not saying anything yet, but that doesn’t matter right now. What we need to focus on is getting out of here.”
She grew still. “Getting out of here? Did they find one in town?”
“No,” he said quickly. “But they’re all over Los Angeles, and some in Bakersfield and Las Vegas.”
They were surrounded.
“I don’t want to be here when someone who’s been infected shows up,” he explained.
“But where are we going?”
“The Fullers’ cabin. They went back east for the holidays, so no one’s there.”
The Fullers’ cabin was in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, not that far away. Martina and her family had borrowed the place for a week just that past summer.
He looked her in the eye. “I really need your help. Are you going to be okay?”
The person she’d been before the previous spring would have probably argued with him, saying he was overreacting, and that they should just wait and it would probably turn out to be nothing. But coming so close to death changed all that.
“I’ll get the water,” she said.
“Thanks, sweetie.”
__________
THEY TOOK THE back way to the cabin, using one of the winding roads that went up through a steep valley on the desert side of the mountains. When they’d taken the same road in the past, it had always been sparsely traveled. This time, there were dozens of vehicles, all heading up.
“Looks like other people were thinking the same thing,” Martina said.
Her father barely nodded in acknowledgment. He had a tight grip on the wheel, and his mood had darkened every time he glanced at the cars behind them. She knew he’d been hoping they’d be alone.
At the top of the canyon, the road crested over a pass into a high plain, where the desert gave way to the thin fringes of a forest that thickened with every passing mile. Here and there were small patches of snow, a few inches deep at best. That might change soon, Martina thought. The clouds that had been hanging high above their desert valley were much lower here, and were dark and heavy with moisture.
“You brought the tire chains, right?” she asked.
“Of course we did,” Donny said. “They’re in the back. What do you think? That we’re stupid?”
He was fourteen and in that wonderful phase that made Martina want to be nowhere near him pretty much all the time. Still, she held back the response that wanted to jump from her lips. It wouldn’t serve any purpose, and he was just being a kid anyway. The restraint was a grown-up move on her part, one she would have patted herself on the back for if she wasn’t so scared.
“Maybe we should try the radio again,” her mother suggested. She reached over and flipped the radio back on.
The narrow valley they had driven up from the desert had blocked the signal to their satellite radio, so they had kept it off. On again, it tried hard to reestablish a signal, but there were just too many trees and mountain peaks getting in the way.
“We’ll check again at the cabin,” her mother announced, turning it off again. “I’m sure it will work there.”
In a way, Martina was happy they weren’t able to pick up anything. When they’d listened to the news before they lost reception, there had really been nothing new, just the same reports and speculation over and over again. It had started to drive her crazy.
The old highway through the forest had several intersecting roads branching off from it. Here and there cars would turn off, heading to whatever destination they had in mind. When the Gables finally reached the turnoff for the Fullers’ cabin, there were only two other cars left behind them.
Though the new road was unpaved and bumpy, Martina’s father seemed less tense.
The change didn’t last long. A few minutes later, his disposition reverted back to what it had been at the beginning of their trip. They were skirting the edge of a large meadow that allowed them to see a good portion of the road behind them. There, about a quarter-mile back, was one of the cars that had been on the main road.
“Relax, Ken,” Martina’s mother said to her husband. “There are a lot of places out this way.”
He grunted, but said nothing.
A few seconds later Donny said, “Isn’t that the Webers’ car?”
Martina looked back at the other vehicle. It did kind of look like the Webers’ car, but there were probably about a thousand other models they could have said that about.
Mr. Weber worked in the same building as Martina’s dad. He and his wife had three kids, a set of twins who were high school seniors this year, and a younger girl who was either a sophomore or freshman. The Webers were part of the same bridge club her parents were in, and the families had occasionally done things together in the past.
The meadow fell away as they reentered the woods, and the car—the Webers’ or not—disappeared with it. As soon as it was out of sight, Martina’s father increased their speed.
Her mother grabbed the dash. “Ken, please. You’re going to get into an accident.”
The car vibrated as it bounced over the road, but Martina’s father didn’t slow down.
“Ken!”
As the road bent to the left, the back end of the car fishtailed for a second before it came back under control.
“For God’s sake! We’re not going to have to worry about whatever’s happening everywhere else. You’re going to kill us!”
He leaned forward, his chin nearly touching the wheel as he gripped it more tightly.
“Ken!”
Martina’s mother looked at him, her eyes wide. It appeared as if she was going to yell at him, but, like Martina had done earlier with her brother, her mother held her tongue and turned back to watch the road.
They almost missed the turnoff to the Fullers’ place. It was Donny who pointed just in time at the tree with the missing branch that marked the road. Martina’s father slammed on the brakes, kicking up a small dust cloud, and made the turn.
The dirt road was really just a long driveway that led across a portion of the twenty acres the Fullers owned. The rains from the previous spring had created a wash down the middle that had unevenly eroded the dirt surface. Martina’s father had to slow the car down to a crawl several times, and even then couldn’t avoid scraping the undercarriage.
The cabin was tucked within the trees, so it appeared almost out of nowhere after a leisurely curve to the left. There were no lights on inside, and no other cars parked out front.
As soon as they pulled to a stop near the front door, Martina’s father said, “Let’s get everything inside right away,” and climbed out.
Donny jumped out after him, and Martina reached for her door handle to do the same, but then she realized her mother hadn’t moved.
A sniffle. Low, as if it wasn’t supposed to be heard.
“Mom?” Martina said.
Her mother shook her head. “Go help your father,” she said quickly.
Martina leaned forward between the seats. “Mom, are you all right?”
“I’ll be fine.”
Martina knew that wasn’t true. Her mother’s eyes were wet, and a few tears had already traveled down her cheeks. Martina put her arms around her, hugging her as best she could with the seat between them. “It’s going to be okay, Mom. We’re safe here.”
“I know…it’s just…it’s not a great day for any of us, I guess.”
“Yeah, I’ve had better.”
“Me, too,” her mother said.
They looked at each other, then Martina grinned, and they both laughed softly.
Pale Horse (A Project Eden Thriller) Page 15