“Then we follow them.”
Why in the world would Jon take Brandon back to the barn? Matt wondered as they headed down the road. He had told Hayes to go into the forest and find one of the emergency supply stashes before hiking out to the highway. Going to the barn would have been extremely risky. The helicopters would have surely checked it.
As they neared the barn, two of the men ran ahead, while the rest continued following the footprints.
Miller stopped, still watching the ground. “It’s kind of a mess here. Tracks going to the barn and to the woods over there.” He pointed to the right.
The men who’d gone to the barn jogged back up.
“Well?” Matt asked.
“No one’s there, but someone was,” one of the men said. “All the stalls are empty, and the horses are gone.”
Matt looked past the two men at the barn, searching for any sign of the animals, but none were around.
“Could they have ridden away on one of them?” Barlow asked.
That thought had crossed Matt’s mind, too, but it would have been a huge risk. The attack team from Project Eden could easily have spotted them on a horse, and chased them down with one of their helicopters.
“I think they went into the woods on foot,” Miller said. He crouched down next to the footprints. “These leading toward the trees? They’re on top of the other ones, so they’re the last ones made.”
“They could have doubled back to the barn on the grass,” Barlow argued.
Miller shrugged, conceding the point, but not seeming to buy into it.
Matt looked at the barn, then at the woods. “I think the horses were only a diversion. Jon wouldn’t have risked taking one. We go into the woods.” He touched the transmit button on the radio. “Christina, what’s the closest emergency supply location from the barn?”
There was a pause, then she said, “There are three within a two-mile radius. One is a mile and a half northwest of you, one almost due west three-quarters of a mile, and one is northeast just over half a mile. I can send you all of their coordinates, if you’d like.”
Matt looked down at the prints Miller had found. The set on top was heading east. It was also the only logical direction to find civilization.
“Just the last one for now,” he said. “We’ll check there first.”
__________
THERE WAS NO question that the emergency stash in the east was the one Jon and Brandon had visited. It was half uncovered, and many of the supplies were gone.
Matt shone his flashlight into the tube. Per procedure, all the empty bags from the supplies they had taken had been put back inside, but, oddly, they had all been scrunched toward the bottom, like someone had crawled into the tube and stamped them down with their feet. An unnecessary step. Also, why had Hayes left the top half off? He should have replaced the metal plate and pushed the loose ground cover back over it.
The men from the team were scattered around the area, searching every square inch for any clues.
“Anything?” Matt called out.
“They walked in together from over there,” Miller said, pointing in the same direction they had come from. “I also found two sets of prints heading away. They’re both going in the same general direction, but they’re not on the same path.”
“You mean they split up?”
“Or left at different times. Which is pretty much the same thing, I guess.”
The team broke into two groups—Matt, Barlow, and two of the other men following Brandon’s prints; and Miller and the other two following Hayes’s. It wasn’t long before the two sets of tracks diverged enough that the groups were no longer in sight of each other.
There was only one reason Matt could think of for Hayes and Brandon to split up. Someone from the Project Eden team must have been in the area. That also could explain the compacted bags in the storage tube. Perhaps Brandon was hiding inside.
Matt could see the hint of a clearing ahead. Just before they reached it, the radio came to life.
“Matt,” Miller said. “You need to come here.”
“Where are you?”
“There’s a clearing. It’s pretty much straight northeast of where—”
“We’re just coming to it now,” Matt said.
“You’ll see us once you get here.”
As soon as Matt stepped out from the woods, he spotted the others. Miller and the two men with him were hunched over something on the ground. It wasn’t until Matt was a few feet away that he saw the legs of a man.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said.
Miller turned. “It’s Hayes.”
“Dead?”
Miller nodded. “Shot in the back.”
Matt knelt down next to Miller and looked at the body. Hayes was lying on his back, part of his chest blown out.
“You turned him over?” Matt asked. If Hayes had been shot in the back, he should have been lying on his stomach.
“No. He was already like this.”
So it was either the person who killed him who turned him over, or…
God, let me be wrong.
Matt struggled back to his feet. “We need to look for Brandon,” he said loudly enough for all of them to hear. “Spread out. Check everywhere.”
After twenty minutes of searching, the only thing they discovered were depressions in the meadow where a helicopter had landed.
That troubled Matt even more. Had they taken Brandon?
They carefully checked the area around where the helicopter had been, but the ground was a mixture of dead grass and leaves, so no footprints had been left behind. No way to know who might have boarded the aircraft.
“Miller,” Matt called out. When the man came over, he said, “I want you to do a circuit just outside the clearing. See if you can pick up Brandon’s trail again and figure out which way he went.”
“No problem.”
As Miller started to turn away, Matt said, “Look very hard.”
24
MONTANA
12:17 PM MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME
BRANDON HAD TOLD the woman what he could. The Ranch and the people there, he said nothing about. When she wondered how he knew what he did, he’d kept his mouth shut. He was confident she believed him, though; he could see it in her eyes.
Once she had finished asking him questions, she’d let him get some food from the kitchen, where he noted the back exit out of the corner of his eye. She then ushered him back down to the room in the cellar.
“Take an inventory,” she told him, pointing her gun at a clipboard hanging on the wall.
His face scrunched in confusion. “What?”
“Check to make sure everything on that list is still correct.”
“Wouldn’t you already know that?”
Her mouth tightened into a tense, straight line. “Just do it,” she said. She slammed the door closed and locked it again.
Having no intention of counting cans and jars, he had spent most of the morning thinking of ways he could get away. They all came down to the same thing—if the opportunity presented itself, he would just run.
A good enough plan, except for one big problem: the gun. Would she actually take a shot at him? He didn’t think so, but it was hard not to remember the hole in Hayes’s chest.
While he’d been thinking, he could hear the woman walking around upstairs. She seemed to be in constant motion, moving from room to room, pulling open doors, scraping across the floor. She was still alone, though, so maybe the person she lived with wasn’t home. He hoped so.
After a while, the woman turned up the volume on her computer so loud that he could hear the wah-wah-wah of the voices on the news resonating through the floor. Occasionally, he could even make out a word here and there, but mostly had no idea what was being said.
As the time passed, he started thinking about that coming evening. He didn’t want to spend it in the cellar. He wanted to be away from there, as far as possible. He paced back and forth, his anxiety increasing.<
br />
Finally, he stopped himself, knowing he needed to distract his mind so he wouldn’t wind himself up so much.
He caught a glimpse of the clipboard.
It’s better than nothing.
So, despite his earlier decision, he began checking the woman’s supplies. In addition to the cans of cream of mushroom soup, there were hundreds of others containing pears, apricots, baked beans, lima beans, peas, pineapple chunks, Spam, and beets, just to name a few. The jars, with the exception of seventy-two containing Ragu spaghetti sauce, were all labeled on the lid and filled with things he guessed the woman had jarred herself—cherry preserves, apple sauce, pickles, stewed tomatoes, and the like.
After a while he started to get hungry again. Checking his watch, he saw that it was already past noon. If she didn’t come soon, he might be tempted to open one of the jars. The applesauce looked pretty good.
He was halfway through the final section when he heard the woman coming down the basement stairs. He turned as the door opened, prepared to hand over the inventory, hoping that if he seemed to be cooperating, she might ease up on him a bit.
The look on her face made him forget all about the clipboard in his hand. Her eyes were wide and her mouth slightly open. Stunned was the only word to describe her. It was then that he noticed she wasn’t holding her rifle.
“Come,” she said. She turned, leaving the door open.
By the time he reached the stairs, she was already at the top. He raced up the steps, and into the kitchen. The woman wasn’t there, but he could hear her around the corner in the living room. He looked to the left, taking his first good glimpse of the rear door to the house.
Go!
He started to take a step, then froze in surprise. His backpack. It was sitting by the door, just off to the side.
Run.
This time, it wasn’t the sight of his bag that stopped him, but the voice coming from the computer in the other room.
“…again. As the president finished his speech, we received a release from the Department of Homeland Security. A three-hour grace period will start at the top of the hour to allow people to get home. After that, anyone outside without proper authorization will be in violation of the curfew and subject to arrest. The release also lists in detail what you can do to protect yourself and your family in your home. We have posted the document on our website, and will be going over the points in just a few minutes. But first, we’re going to replay the president’s speech in its entirety.”
By the time the news anchor finished speaking, Brandon had moved into the living room. The woman was standing in front of the computer, her eyes glued to the screen. The image on the monitor changed to a familiar one of the president sitting at his desk in the Oval Office.
“My fellow Americans and citizens in nations throughout the world, over the last…”
Brandon listened as the president spoke of the Sage Flu and the measure to stop it that hadn’t worked.
Before the president finished, the woman looked over. “You can’t fake this. That’s really the president. This is really happening.”
It was as if at that very moment, the full reality of it hit her. She staggered forward, grabbed for the desk chair, and sank to the floor.
Run! the voice in his head yelled again.
He spotted the rifle. It was clear across the room near the front door. He could easily make it outside before she could grab it.
Still, he hesitated. She hadn’t moved since she’d fallen to the floor. Maybe he should help her. She’d probably just been scared when she found him in the garage.
Run!
Instead, he took one step toward her. “Do what they tell you,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll be all right.”
She turned toward him in slow motion. He had expected to see shock and fear on her face. What he saw were unfocused eyes and a strange, crooked smile. She stared at him for a moment, then slowly turned away.
He backed out of the room, and passed quickly through the kitchen. She wouldn’t come after him. He knew that now. In fact, he’d be surprised if she moved from where she was before the sun went down. Still—
Run!
He picked up his pack, opened the door, and did just that.
25
DUBLIN, IRELAND
7:45 PM WESTERN EUROPEAN TIME
SEAN O’BRIEN FELT the sweat running past his ear. He wanted nothing more than to wipe it off, but the biosafe gear he was wearing made that impossible. He looked over at Ryan Dunne and wondered if his partner had the same problem. Ryan, though, looked as calm as ever behind the faceplate of his hood.
“Remind me to talk to whoever designed these things,” Sean said. “Would be nice if it had something built in to cool us off.”
“Stop complaining.”
“You can’t tell me you’re not hot in there, too.”
“What I’m feeling doesn’t matter.”
They made an odd pair, Sean and Ryan. Sean was the joker, the guy always telling the stories at the pub, while Ryan was all business all the time. But this had translated into a surprisingly strong partnership, and they’d worked well together for the five years they’d both been part of the Protection Branch of An Garda Síochána, Ireland’s national police.
While many of those in their branch were geared more toward liaison work with other agencies, Sean and Ryan were situational specialists, called in when something delicate needed handling. Which was why they’d been chosen to try to deactivate one of the shipping containers that had shown up in the city. This particular one was just outside Trinity College, and had been belching out, for hours and hours, what the Americans had just confirmed was a virus.
An area of over half a mile around the box in every direction had already been evacuated. Unfortunately, the residents had fled in a near panic, leaving cars strewn haphazardly throughout the neighborhood. This meant Sean and Ryan had been forced to walk in, wearing the less-than-comfortable suits, instead of riding in most of the way in the back of a truck.
Because neither destroying nor moving the boxes had worked elsewhere, Sean and Ryan were tasked with finding out if they could just be turned off. The fact that this had also been unsuccessfully attempted elsewhere didn’t faze their bosses. The men were told to get in there and find a way.
“I could use a pint,” Sean said.
“Maybe you can suggest that to the suit designers, too, and they can put in a feeding tube.”
“Oh, a joke. What’s gotten into you, Mr. Dunne?”
Sean could see Ryan shake his head, but his partner didn’t reply.
It was weird to be walking down streets that were usually teeming with students and locals at this time of the evening. It felt like a ghost town. Sean almost expected a tumbleweed to roll across the road, and some eerie organ music to start playing.
But the only unusual sound was the hum, increasing in volume with every block. They knew from overhead surveillance that it was generated by two large fans at the top of the box. They had expected to hear it, but it was still unsettling.
They turned the final corner and stopped as they had their first direct view of the container. According to the reports, a considerable number of the boxes had been found near construction sites. Theirs was no different. It was a block and a half away, sitting in front of an old apartment building in the process of being torn down.
Even from this distance, they could see the slightly distorted air above the container where the vapor was being pushed out.
“Let’s get this done,” Ryan said.
Sean turned on the microphone to the radio. “Dani, you have our visual?”
Dani, more formally known as Danielle Sullivan, was handling communications back at the checkpoint.
“Your cameras are working fine,” she said. Both men had micro cameras attached inside their hoods at the base of their faceplates. “You’re clear to move in.”
“Proceeding to the container now.”
The two began walk
ing toward the container. Sean wasn’t sure what Ryan was feeling, but for him every step took renewed effort, as if the road itself were melting around his feet and holding him down. It didn’t help that several droplets of the liquid from the box had landed on his faceplate.
Much too quickly for his taste, they reached the box. Up close, its dark blue metal siding looked worn and in need of fresh paint. With the exception of the roof that shouldn’t have been open, it looked like a normal shipping container.
Ryan put a hand on the side. Reluctantly, Sean did the same. The hum that he heard matched the vibration coming through his protective glove. There was no way to describe it other than it felt evil. He could leave his hand there for only a couple of seconds before pulling it away.
“I’ll go this way,” he said to Ryan, nodding to his left. “Meet you on the other side.”
Heading in opposite directions, they circled the container, looking for a way to gain access to the inside. The only thing Sean found were the doors at the short end. Like the other containers in the reports they’d received, the doors had an odd-looking lock system. No one, apparently, had been able to break through it yet—at least not without setting off the explosives inside.
“Anything?” he asked Ryan when they met up in the back.
“Nothing that I could see.”
“I’ll give the door a try, just in case, but we’ll probably have to go in through the top.”
“I agree,” Ryan said.
“Dani, you got that, right?”
“Got it,” she said. “Just be careful, okay?”
“If we were careful, we’d be sitting out there with you.”
“Be as careful as you can, then.”
While Ryan scoped out the easiest route to the top, Sean went back around to the door on the short side. He gave the handle a try first, but it didn’t move. He examined the lock next, hoping to discover some way of disengaging it. As he ran his hand along the backside of the device, the hum and vibration began to fade.
Pale Horse (A Project Eden Thriller) Page 17