The Project Eden Thrillers Box Set 2: Books 4 - 6 (Ashes, Eden Rising, & Dream Sky)

by Brett Battles

  He swiped his card in front of the reader and rushed into the tunnel.

  Thirty-One

  THE EXPLOSION KNOCKED Principal Director Perez to the floor. Claudia was only able to maintain her feet because she fell into his desk and held on tight.

  As soon as he could, Perez shoved himself up.

  “Are you okay?” Claudia asked.

  “I’m fine,” he growled.

  “Your head,” she said, touching a spot on her own forehead. “It’s bleeding.”

  He touched his head and felt the cut that was spilling out blood. “It’s nothing. Get security. I want to know how the hell that happened! I thought someone was taking care of it.”

  Claudia picked up the phone, but instead of punching in a number, she looked at Perez. “It’s dead.”

  “Dammit. Can we get them on video?”

  “Let me try.” She circled the desk to his computer. It still seemed to be working, but after several seconds, she shook her head. “They’re not answering.”

  “Can we at least find out if there are any cameras out there still working so we can see how extensive the damage is?”

  “Should be able to.”

  It took nearly a minute before the center screen came on. The feed was from a camera in one of the hallways. No obvious damage, but several people were lying on the ground.

  “Is this close to the explosion?” Perez asked.

  “I don’t know. The system’s only giving me camera numbers, not locations.”

  “Are there any others?”

  “Hold on.”

  The next feed came up thirty seconds later, an empty conference room.

  “That doesn’t tell us anything.”

  “I’m sorry. I told you all the labels are missing. I think the blast did something to the system.”

  “Keep going.”

  A new camera showed a wider hallway, lit only by two emergency lights spread far apart. More bodies on the ground.

  “I recognize this,” Claudia said. “It’s one of the hallways leading to the elevator.”

  The blast concussion must have been intense enough to knock everyone out.

  “Is that someone?” he asked. Something was moving in the shadows at the far end.

  “I can’t tell. Could be a camera glitch.”

  She switched to the next feed.

  “Oh, my God,” she said.

  The image was of a common area. Like the corridor they’d seen first, there was no damage but there were bodies. Lots of bodies.

  “This is near the barracks,” he said.

  That was nowhere near the elevators, and he was sure the blast could not have done that to everyone. Were they being attacked by a whole squad?

  “Is there an escape exit in here?” he asked.

  While most of the Project Eden bases were the same, a few details changed from location to location—an escape exit in the director’s suite being one of them. Perez had been so busy since he’d taken over as principal director, he hadn’t had time to worry about such things.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “The previous director didn’t share that information with me.”

  Dammit.

  “All right, you and I need to look for it. There’s got to be one here.”

  She glanced at the monitor. “If we go out there, that’ll happen to us, too, won’t it?”

  “Claudia! Help me find the exit!”

  NOT EVERYONE MATT passed in the hallways was dead, but there was no question they soon would be. He felt no compassion for any of them, no guilt for what he’d done. Every last one of them had taken an active role in the deaths of billions. They deserved their fate. Just like he would eventually deserve his.

  A fire was raging at the epicenter of the explosion, its heat prickling his skin. He idly wondered if the flames would consume all the air down here. If so, those who had survived his gas attack would live only to suffocate a few hours later. Again, the thought did not trouble him.

  Not surprisingly, the door to the principal director’s suite was closed. Matt waved in front of the reader the ID card he’d taken from Sims, but nothing happened, not even a beep denying him access. He pulled out the card Wicks had given him, and encountered the same result.

  That was all right. He had a solution.

  Switching the rifle to semiautomatic, he aimed at the area around the lock and shot an arc through the door.

  THE GUNFIRE DIDN’T frighten Perez. It merely focused his anger.

  Claudia, on the other hand, screamed.

  “Keep looking,” he ordered.

  He ran his fingers under the countertop behind his desk. Three inches from the end farthest from the door, he found a switch. He pushed it, but nothing happened.

  What the hell?

  Out in the antechamber, the gunfire ceased.

  He pushed it again, and this time heard a click under the cover. He dropped to his knees, sure he’d discovered the way out, but what he found instead was only the latch for the exit door. The escape exit itself had never been built.

  He dove toward his desk, pulled open the bottom drawer, and fished around for the Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol he kept there. As he freed the gun, the door to his office flew open. He aimed across the room, but no one was there.

  “Principal Director Perez,” a strange-sounding voice said from the other room. “It’s good to meet you.”

  Perez aimed at the wall he thought the man was hiding behind, and pulled the trigger.

  “Good thinking,” the intruder said. “And not bad on the aim, either. But these bases were built to last. No flimsy walls around here. Trust me, I knew the guy in charge of putting them in.”

  Who the hell was this guy?

  “What do you want?” Perez said.

  “Already have what I want, thanks. You just aren’t aware of it yet.”

  Perez moved to the other corner of his desk so that he’d have a more acute angle on the doorway He couldn’t see anything yet, so, with gun held out in front, he carefully stepped out from cover.

  Across the room, Claudia coughed.

  “Ah, that got back there quicker than I expected,” the voice said.

  As Perez narrowed his eyes, unsure what the man meant, he had the sudden need to blink.

  Another cough, but this one was his.

  “Downward spiral from here, I’m afraid,” the voice said.

  Perez staggered back to his desk, his chest heaving. Between blinks, he saw something move into the doorway. He lifted his hand, raising the gun, only he wasn’t holding it anymore. He looked around. It was on the ground where he’d started blinking. He took a step toward it but began coughing again.

  “You won’t need that anymore,” the voice said, closer now.

  The voice belonged to a man, that much Perez could tell, but what the guy looked like was hidden behind a full-face gas mask.

  “How you feeling? Pretty crappy, huh?” The man looked past Perez. “I think your friend over there’s done for. Sorry about that.” He turned back to Perez. “You know what? That’s a lie. I’m not sorry.”

  Perez could feel his strength draining away, but he wasn’t ready to collapse yet. “Who...are you?” he said.

  “Me? I was a member of Project Eden, way before your time.” The man looked around. “I helped build this place. Yeah, but then I realized what was really going on. Been trying to stop you guys ever since. The destruction of Bluebird? That was my people. The message you were telling everyone about tonight? Mine, too.”

  The gnat, Perez realized. This man was the gnat who had been bugging the Project for years.

  “You aren’t…going to stop…anything,” Perez said, forcing each word out. “The Project’s too big.”

  “I guess that’s a wait-and-see thing, isn’t it? Only you won’t be around to see it. But trust me, it’s going to happen.”

  Perez doubled over in a coughing fit.

  “Bet that hurts,” the man said. “You know, it’s amazing what you c
an find when you hunt around a deserted military base. I guess I could have taken a nuke, but that would have been too heavy to carry in here. The gas is a nice touch, though, don’t you think? From the poetic point of view, it would have been better if it was some kind of deadly disease you all weren’t vaccinated against, but this will work faster.”

  Perez wasn’t about to give the man the satisfaction of his death. With his last ounce of will, he pushed himself up, and said as forcibly as he could, “This isn’t going to kill me.”

  “Perhaps not,” the man told him. “Could be not enough of the gas got back here to kill both of you. That’s a shame.”

  He raised his rifle and shot Perez in the thigh.

  Screaming, Perez fell to the ground.

  “Caught the artery on the first shot. Not bad,” the man said. “Now you are going to die. You’re going to bleed out right there on that nice carpet, in this nice office.” The man plopped down on the desk. “And I’m sitting right here until you do.”

  Perez rolled onto his back, knowing the man was right.

  I was so close. A few more weeks, maybe a month, and I would have truly ruled the world.

  Through half-closed eyes, he looked at the man and whispered, “Fucking gnat.”

  MATT WAITED UNTIL he was sure Perez was dead before leaving the office.

  The former principal director had said his death would not stop the Project, and that was true, but it was a big step in that direction.

  He wondered if Wicks had been able to get out. He hoped so. His old friend had done a lot for the Resistance from the inside, and didn’t deserve the death the others here had received.

  Matt, on the other hand, wasn’t so sure about himself. There was a part of him that wanted to pull off his gas mask, and face the punishment he felt he deserved. Maybe if Wicks hadn’t come through with the information he’d passed along, Matt could have gone through with it, but now it wasn’t an option.

  There was a thud somewhere in the hall behind him. Thinking it was probably the echo of something collapsing closer to the explosion, he kept walking.

  Someone yelled behind him, the voice so strained and raw he couldn’t make out any words.

  When he turned, he saw he was no longer the only one still breathing in the hallway. Down by the last corridor intersection, a woman was leaning against the wall. She was staring at him, her chest heaving. It wouldn’t be long, he knew, before she joined her dead colleagues.

  As she pushed from the wall and took a few staggering steps toward him, he realized he’d seen her before. She was the woman who had been in the office with Perez. Matt had seen her crumble to the floor and assumed she’d died.

  Yelling again, she raised her hand as if to point at him, only it wasn’t her finger she was aiming in his direction.

  Thirty-Two

  BELINDA RAMSEY’S SNOWMOBILE ride south has taken her just over the Illinois border when the motor begins to smoke. Another two miles on, the machine dies. With no other options, Belinda starts hiking toward the town of South Beloit, hoping she can find someplace warm to sleep. She tells herself she will look for a new snowmobile, but in the morning. She’s too tired to do that now.

  As she nears a neighborhood on the edge of town, she hears something in the distance. At first she thinks someone has left a music player on somewhere, perhaps looping through a playlist that will go on and on until the power finally goes out.

  But it’s not music, she soon realizes. It’s words being spoken.

  She skips the neighborhood and continues toward town, toward the sound, and it’s not long before she can start making out what’s being said.

  “…help you. We will be in the parking lot of the high school on Prairie Hill Road in ten minutes. We will stay there for an additional thirty. This is the Untied Nations. We are here to help you. We will be in the parking lot of…”

  Belinda starts to laugh in happiness. She’s not going to need a snowmobile tomorrow. She’s not going to ever need a snowmobile again. The UN is here. Her nightmare is over.

  She searches for a road sign and finds she is actually on Prairie Hill Road. But she hasn’t seen a high school yet, and has no idea how far away it is.

  Though the snow is not as deep here as it was in Madison, it’s still too deep for her to run through, so she has to settle for walking fast. Even then, it’s over twenty minutes before the high school comes into sight. She is both relieved that she doesn’t have far to go, and scared to death that the UN will already be gone.

  But a blue tourist bus with UN painted in white on the side is idling in the parking lot.

  She weeps as a soldier meets her at the lot’s entrance. She thanks him over and over as he gives her some food and guides her onto the bus.

  Three of the seats are already taken. Their occupants, wrapped in blankets, stare at her. She smiles hesitantly, then notices not one of them is sitting near another.

  Hiking her scarf over her face, she takes her own isolated spot.

  As the bus begins to roll, she leans back and relaxes. Before sleep can take her, though, she remembers her journal and her promise to record her journey. She opens it, enters the time and date, and then writes a single word:

  SAVED!

  BEN BOWERMAN STANDS in the modest living room of the Cape Cod house in Santa Cruz where he found Iris the previous day. He has returned because it’s the only place he knows that she might come back to. But she is not there.

  He’s now sure he will never see the picture his mother loved so much again, or retrieve the earrings he’d picked out for Martina. Tomorrow he will head south once more, this time in the car he found in Salinas. Tonight, he will find a hotel and sleep.

  But he finds he can’t leave the house just yet. He wants to know what happened here, what he got tangled up in. If there are answers in the house, he figures he will find them in the dead man’s room.

  Seeing Mr. Carlson on the bed for a third time is not nearly so disturbing as it was before. Ben can see now there’s something under the man’s hand, partly hidden by the covers. A piece of paper. Ben teases it free without having to touch body or blanket. There are words scribbled on it, but the writer’s hand was so shaky Ben can only make out “Iris” and “door.”

  He searches the dresser but the closet is where he finds his answer. Tucked against one end is a filing cabinet, and every item inside pertains either directly or indirectly to Iris, Mr. Carlson’s daughter.

  The words on the documents say many things, but all paint the same picture. The girl does not see the world the same way others do, and never has. Drugs have been tried, hospital stays, intensive therapy. Some appear to have worked better than others, but none truly well.

  Ben wants to still feel angry at Iris, but he doesn’t.

  What he feels instead is tired.

  AT SOME POINT, Martina gives up looking for the girl and just drives. She goes into the hills above Ventura, back to the coast, and finally down Highway 1 through Oxnard toward Malibu.

  She runs out of gas not long before the sun goes down, so she leaves the bike at the side of the road, wanders aimlessly onto the beach, and sits on the berm crest, facing the water.

  If she’s paying attention, she will see a beautiful sunset, but she’s not. Her mind is both idle and racing.

  She doesn’t mean to, but she will sleep here tonight. And when she wakes in the morning, though she won’t voice it, she will feel for the first time that she is completely alone.

  THE ONE THING Sanjay did not take from the Pishon Chem compound was a box of syringes. While the others are resting as they wait for the sun to set, he and Kusum search local medical facilities until they collect enough syringes to give shots to everyone they have rescued.

  Once darkness finally falls, Sanjay, Kusum, Jabala, and Prabal say good-bye to Arjun and Darshana, who will be staying in the city to try to stop others from going to the survival station. They then head out of Mumbai with the newly inoculated escapees, in a bus they fin
d on a nearby street.

  When they arrive at the boarding school, those they have rescued are given food and shown to empty dorms, while the boxes of vaccine are stored away.

  “Why are you not sleeping?” Kusum asks Sanjay later as they lie in bed.

  “Why are you not?” he counters.

  “I am thinking about the vaccine.”

  It’s what he’s thinking about, too. “We cannot wait for people to come to us,” he says. “We need to somehow let them know we can help them.”

  “I know,” she says. “But how exactly are we supposed to do that without the people from Pishon Chem finding us?”

  “I have no idea,” he said. “That is why I cannot sleep.”

  THE RESTAURANT DINING room of the Isabella Island Resort seems a lot smaller after so many hours with everyone jammed into it. Or maybe it’s knowing what they’re hiding from that’s making it feel like the walls are pushing in, Robert thinks.

  The liquid that coated the windows after the plane flew over is now dry, but no one is foolish enough to think the danger has passed.

  As the evening grows late, the satellite phone Pax has brought with him rings. When he finishes talking, he waves Robert over and says, “You’re going to want to turn on the TV.”

  Robert does, and is surprised to find that Gustavo Di Sarsina has been replaced by a familiar face—Tamara Costello, a reporter he has seen on TV in the past.

  No one sleeps for hours, as they all watch Tamara deliver her message over and over, never quite the same way twice. When the TV is finally turned off, even Pax’s most ardent critics are starting to believe he’s been telling the truth.

  Robert’s eyelids grow heavy as he lies next to Estella later.

  “Do you think they might come back?” she asks.

  “Who?”

  “These people. Project Eden. Do you think they will come back to make sure we are dead?”