He was stiff and sore from his truck dive, but it appeared he’d pulled through without too much damage. The ankle he’d been certain was broken was mildly sprained and would likely loosen up with continued work. After the systems check, he slithered out of the back of the ditch and disappeared into the trees. Fortunately, these were evergreens, full with needles, like a green wall. The air was thick with the scent of pine, and he was reminded of the smell of Christmas tree lots.
He trekked eastward through the trees, toward the lights, slowly, slowly, as though each step might find a land mine. A thick layer of pine needles muted his footsteps. It was cold, but his Gore-Tex jacket was doing what it was supposed to be doing, keeping him dry and warm enough that he wasn’t excessively worried about how cold it was. It took forty minutes to reach the eastern edge of the compound, each one soaked in fear of stumbling across a late-night patrol sweeping the grounds or setting off some invisible alarm. After a quarter mile, the tree cover began to thin, and so he was left to slink along in the shadows, almost trying to melt into the wall.
He paused for a short break at the wall and ate a protein bar. As he snacked, he glassed the terrain ahead. A cluster of development awaited him to the north, starting with a row of nondescript buildings, shadowy monoliths in the night. This chilled him and made him hot with rage all at the same time, this human presence, the people holding Rachel captive. He gave himself five minutes to rest and then set off again, mentally cataloging each landmark he came across. A long rectangular building fronting on a cut-through access road. Across the way, a fenced-off generator field, the machines lined up like silent soldiers. A low hum filled his ears.
Beyond that, he spotted two more nondescript buildings, also inside the fence line. He studied each carefully, but he was unable to identify either structure’s purpose. That was when he heard the rustle of activity just around the bend, possibly coming from the intersecting road just north of his position. He froze as the conspiratorial whispers of men on a mission drew closer, scanning their surroundings. A row of bushes lined the road, perhaps ornamental by design, but lifesaving by function. He ducked down behind the hedges as a group of three men came by. They walked briskly and with purpose.
They continued past his position, and as the gulf between them grew, he felt his heart rate decelerate. They hadn’t seen him. He maintained a northerly course, torn between competing desires to tread carefully and to finish his sweep as quickly as possible. As he continued, the development seemed to thin out, and he began to hear a strange sound, coupled with the tickle in his nose of an earthy, fecund smell. Not mechanical, but not human, either. The sound of livestock. The grunts and braying emanating from the animal pens pushed him along. He had no desire to find out if these animals served some early-warning function, alerting their masters that an intruder was present.
As he ventured farther north, the odor intensified, and the snorts and chortles grew clearer. A pig here. A chicken there. In the ever-faint ambient light, Adam could just make out the edge of a barn. Again, he found himself wondering who these people really were. This kind of installation would have required an astonishing amount of capital. Some eccentric billionaire? Perhaps a secret government project?
And how had they survived?
The flash of approaching headlights derailed his train of thought, sent his testicles up into his stomach. There was very little cover along the wall, so he had drifted to the inside shoulder, toward the middle of the complex. Ahead, there was a copse of bare tree trunks, toward which he bolted, hopefully covering him before the oncoming vehicle lit him up like a Christmas tree. He slipped between the trees, like a flea burrowing into a dog’s thick coat.
The treeline was shallower than he expected, and a moment later, he burst through the other side. The terrain dropped away sharply, and Adam went tumbling downward like a runaway snowball. He waited for the white-hot pain of a snapped leg or torn knee ligament to light up his body, but he came to rest in an unscathed heap on a damp patch of ground. His mind went immediately to the gun, which had come off his shoulder as he barreled to the bottom of the hill. His hands scoured the immediate area around him, scraping and clawing against damp, cold earth, and he nearly let out a sigh of relief when his fingers clamped around the cold steel of the barrel.
He primed his ears and listened for the sounds of pursuit, of a car door slamming shut, of footsteps closing in, and waited to be discovered or not. Seconds ticked by, then minutes, then fifteen minutes, and no one came through the tree line behind him. When he was confident that he’d avoided detection again, he took a moment to run a quick systems check.
He rose to a crouch and was surprised to see a large lake shimmering before him, the night babbling and gurgling, the plink of fish splashing about the rippling surface. The sight of the large body of water stopped him cold; discounting the quick traverse of the Mississippi River in St. Louis, it was the first he’d seen since his terrifying exit from Holden Beach so many months ago.
Seeing the lake scared him; it reminded him how little he knew about this place, and how powerful a foe he was dealing with. He took a deep breath and let it out, enjoying for a brief moment the cold, briny tang of the lake in his nasal passages. He got up and brushed the grit from his pants. He staked out a position just under the lip of the rise and lifted the glasses to his eyes again, back toward the lake.
To his right, a large plot of land, and Adam recognized the long, even rows of a crop field. Several acres’ worth. Scarred, barren columns of earth for now, but, he suspected, part of this place’s lifeblood. It would be up and running sooner than later. To his left, more of the development he’d seen during his northern passage along the east wall.
Frustration lacquered his mind. He felt almost as lost as he’d been before they’d found the place. It seemed as though he’d seen too much of this strange place to keep it all straight but not enough to make any informed decisions about how to proceed next. And fatigue was starting to become a problem. His thinking was becoming soft, disjointed. How long before he made a fatal misstep because his mind was too cloudy to function?
He checked his watch; it was already after four in the morning. The sun would be up soon, meaning he’d have to be safely out of sight by then. Perhaps tucked into the deep woods he’d seen just inside the main gate. With a deep sigh, he abandoned his post and trekked west along another access road, back toward the main road that seemed to encircle the compound. There was a thick cluster of trees across the way and just a hair south, which he set as his target for the night.
He scampered across the highway like an errant possum and dove back into the trees. Thick evergreens here, swallowing him whole. When he looked back, he couldn’t even see the roadway, and the darkness was almost total. There was just enough light by which he could make out the outline of his hand.
It was unnerving, being this deep in the most unknowable spot of an already mysterious land. But he had no choice. And on the plus side, the trees were so thick here, the needle-laden branches so overgrown and interlaced that very little precipitation was making it to the forest floor. Adam set out his bedroll and covered it with a layer of pine needles.
As he slid into the sleeping bag, he was certain that he’d be too consumed with the knowledge that Rachel was right here, so close by, to sleep, but within seconds, he was asleep deep in the bowels of the Citadel.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Something was happening, Rachel thought. Something fundamental had changed.
Wearing a black dress that Chadwick had selected for her, she looked out across the darkened grounds of the Citadel, her eyes bouncing from landmark to landmark. The fields. The amphitheater. Barely in her line of sight, the lake, near the women’s dormitory. The sun had dipped low over the plains and was close to dropping out of sight for the last time this year.
It was New Year’s Eve. Nearly six o’clock. And Rachel Fisher had her dancing shoes on, which was a somewhat remarkable development for her. In
the handful of years that she’d been old enough to go out on New Year’s Eve, she never had. She had never wanted to. She liked to stay in with her few friends and eat Chinese food and watch Will Ferrell movies. She wasn’t one of these types that had bragged about not going out on New Year’s Eve, as though doing nothing had become the cool, hipster thing to do. And she wasn’t one of these types that fell asleep at ten o’clock, either, because she rarely went to bed before one or two in the morning anyway. And if the world had continued along its track rather than derailing, its cars piling up on one another, that’s probably what she would be doing right now.
But now she stood here at a window in the middle of the great empty nowhere, wearing a cocktail dress and waiting on her date for the evening.
It had been a weird few days. She had planned to kill Chadwick that first night. She had fully expected him to take her into his bed, have his way with her. In fact, she was counting on it, and she was going to let him do it, so help her God, praise Jesus, Hallelujah, she was going to let him do whatever he wanted, because when he was done, when he was sleeping the sleep of a man with empty balls, she was going to take the knife she had hidden under the mattress and turn that genocidal son of a bitch into shish kabob.
But he hadn’t done anything she had expected.
Any fears that she’d have to submit to his sexual desires had been totally unfounded. Not only had he not touched her, he had barely even looked at her, so preoccupied he’d been with his work. The first night, she’d stayed up until nearly four in the morning, certain that he’d be back for his prize. He was a man, after all. But eventually, her eyes had drooped shut, and when they’d opened again, sunlight was streaming into Chadwick’s sparsely furnished bedroom, and she was still alone.
Yesterday morning, Chadwick had brought a stack of files home with him. She’d gotten the briefest of peeks at them when he’d stepped inside the bathroom and he’d left them on the table. There were two files, each bearing a woman’s name written in thick black marker. Rachel didn’t recognize the names – Sarah and Charlotte – which seemed to confirm the rumor that there were two newcomers to the women’s camp. But before she’d been able to dig into them at all, he’d rushed out of the bathroom and snatched the files off the table before heading out again. He didn’t seem to care whether she’d seen them or not.
At noon today, he’d returned with the dress and told her to get ready for a very special party. A New Year’s Eve party. He was in the bathroom now, primping for tonight’s event. She’d debated trying to take him in the bathroom, naked, his face dusted with baby powder, but she froze. She didn’t know if she would really go through with it. Could she kill a man, even a monster like Miles Chadwick, in cold blood? What if she hesitated? What if she screwed it up? He would skin her alive. And if she did manage to pull it off, would that bring about the desired result? Or would it accelerate her demise and that of the other women? And Rachel cared for these women, so much so that she couldn’t bear to put their lives at risk.
But what if it did work? What if she stabbed him in the neck, what if she exacted justice for the dead world around her, what if he was the proverbial head of the snake, that without which the Citadel could not survive? They would be free.
Free to pursue whatever life they could cobble together in this new world.
She became aware of a presence behind her, but she acted as if she hadn’t noticed him.
“Is the lady ready?” he said.
“I am,” she replied, finally turning to face him. He was wearing a tuxedo, his skin pink and fresh from a decent scrubbing. His first one in a couple of days, if her nose was serving her well. The sweet stinging scent of Old Spice tickled her nose, and it reminded her of her father, when she used to give him the courtesy hug at the end of their semi-annual visits, wrapping her arms around him just long enough for it to qualify as a hug, and she could smell it on his clothes. She tried to recall the last time she’d seen him, and she tried to remember the length of the hug.
She didn’t think about him much anymore. Not as much as she used to. And she thought that there’d been a chance when she’d finally gotten through to his voicemail. But day after day, the cell phone signal had sluiced away, like a slow drip from a faucet, until it was gone completely, and that had been that.
He was as dead to her as the world gone by.
#
Cocktail hour started promptly at six.
They had walked to the party in almost total silence. As they’d exited the apartment, he had complimented her on her appearance, but it seemed forced, as though he were working through a checklist for a night on the town. She thanked him, and they remained quiet until they arrived at the party. Others were streaming in as they arrived, beautiful men and women dressed to the nines in what was likely the only New Year’s Eve party on the face of the Earth. Before she could stop herself, her mind conjured up images of empty hotel ballrooms across the country, from sea to shining sea, and it made her sad.
Everyone was there, of course. This was a landmark moment for the Citadel, she supposed, closing the book on what had been a most eventful year for them. She imagined there would be speeches and glad-handing, and a lot of patting themselves on the back for a job well done this year. Oh, sure, the executions had been a messy affair, but all new businesses had challenges to face in their first year.
Look how far we’ve come. Look how many people we killed! Cross last year’s resolution off the list because that mission had been mother-fucking accomplished. In Jesus’ name, amen!
People seemed eager to interact with Chadwick, lining up two and three at a time for a chance to speak to the great man, issue good tidings, tell him how proud they were to be part of the Citadel, blah, blah, blah. She remained quiet, nodding a greeting when she was acknowledged by the others. As she glided through the party, she looked for other captives, but there were none. Chadwick was keeping her close, his arm clamped around her waist, making her feel very much the captive she’d been for these past few months.
He chatted with the others, but it was all surface work, one canned statement after another. Doing great, really pleased with how things have gone, you’ve done terrific work. It sounded like the words of a losing politician comforting his staff after he’d made the concessionary telephone call to his opponent. Complete with the fake smile, twin rows of pearly whites flashing every few seconds. He was charming, effusive, and terrifying.
Traffic at the bar was light. A few guests nursed strong drinks, but most stayed away. No one wanted to be falling-down drunk in front of the boss, she supposed. There was chit-chat, but it was muted. From the bits and pieces of conversation Rachel was able to distill from the other attendees, this was the first many of them had seen of Chadwick in some time.
At precisely seven o’clock, a bell tinkled, and the groups began to dissolve as everyone made their way to their seats. The room was set up for a formal dinner, but it was a very utilitarian design, lacking any levity or manufactured glee, the feel of a party thrown together at the last second. She had a seat on the dais, and she could feel the scorn, the heat from her captors who must have been wondering where exactly she fit in the pecking order, now that she was shacking up with the big kahuna.
There were twelve seats on the dais, six on each side of the podium. Two new faces joined her, replacing the pair of now-headless traitors from Chadwick’s high command. She thought often of the sad little rebellion, wishing it had gone a different way, if only to buy her enough time to get herself and the other women out of here. She still wondered what secret Rogers had been preparing to divulge before Chadwick’s men had stormed the warehouse.
Chadwick popped down to the bar and brought back two drinks, one for each of them. This seemed to open the floodgates, and before she could blink, the line at the bar was ten deep.
She accepted the scotch, neat, a double. She took a long drink, and it made her head swim, but it helped calm her nerves. He sat next to her, and they drank toge
ther for a few minutes in silence.
“Look at these people,” he said, so softly, she wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly.
“What about them?” she asked.
“Never mind,” he said. He lifted his glass, and his smile was back. This one seemed genuine, the grin of a man who was truly pleased with things.
“Where were you from?” he asked.
“I grew up in San Diego. Born in Richmond, Virginia.”
“Ahh, the capital of the Confederacy,” he said. “I’ll drink to that. And your family?”
“They’re dead, remember?”
He scrunched up his mouth, and his cheeks flushed. At first, she thought it was from rage, and that he might simply kill her there on the spot, but he simply looked away from her and down at his drink.
“That was insensitive of me,” he said. “I apologize.”
She looked back over the crowd, many of them armed now with their own tumblers of liquid courage.
“Well, I suppose it’s time to address the troops.”
He polished off his scotch and wiped his lips with his fingers. Before he got up, he reached under the table, just over her lap, and for a moment, her breath caught, as she feared that he might simply cop a feel right here in front of everyone, let her know that she was simply his property, that he could do with her as he pleased, whenever he goddamn well felt like it. She vowed that if he touched her she would plunge the butter knife lying next to her plate into some vital organ, an eye, his neck, whatever, the consequences of it all be damned. At least she would die knowing she’d gone down fighting.
She tensed as his hand rooted around under the table. It could only have been a few seconds, but the moment stretched out interminably as she waited for his cold, sweaty hand on her thigh or worse.
The Immune Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 47