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

by Brett Battles

  So how are we going to handle this?

  Get over to the guy before he realized what was going on?

  Call out to him?

  Or follow him for a bit and make sure he wasn’t Project Eden?

  The last seemed the most prudent. The guy was heading toward Nyla’s position anyway. Worst case, she and Gabriel could close in together.

  He let the survivor cross the Alvarado intersection, then he followed.

  A block down, Sunset took a slight southeast turn, so Gabriel cut the gap between them to prevent losing sight of the guy. As he started to slow back down, the toe of his shoe tapped a discarded screw and sent it skittering across the road.

  The man whipped around. “Who’s there?”

  Dammit!

  “Sorry,” Gabriel said, holding his hands out to show they were empty. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Wh…why are you here? Are you following me?” the guy was clearly scared, his voice raised.

  “Yes, I mean, it’s not what you think. I’m here to help.”

  The guy started to back away from him. “I don’t need your help. Thank you. Now leave me alone. Please.”

  There was a click over the receiver in Gabriel’s ear. His eyes flicked past the man, down the street. Though he saw no one there, he knew the click meant Nyla was somewhere nearby.

  He took a step forward. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Good!” The man started to turn away.

  “But if you’re headed for the survival station, the people there will.”

  As the man looked back, Gabriel realized the survivor wasn’t a man at all, but a young woman.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “They aren’t who they claim to be.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The UN doesn’t exist anymore. The people at the stadium are only taking in survivors so they can get rid of them.”

  “Get rid of them?” A look of total disbelief flooded her face. “You mean kill?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe you. You’re…you’re just saying that because…because…”

  She turned and began running down Sunset.

  “I’m not lying,” Gabriel said as he took off after her. “I just want to talk to you.”

  His thighs ached, still remembering the chase from the day before. The runner had gotten away then, but Gabriel had no intention of letting it happen two days in a row. It wasn’t easy, but he was starting to gain on the woman.

  As the road took another bend to the right, Nyla rushed out from behind a car, reaching the middle of the road moments before the survivor got there.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” she said, holding out her arms.

  The woman tried to alter her course to go around Nyla, but she reacted too late and Nyla was able to grab her waist and hold on tight.

  “Let me go!” the woman yelled, squirming.

  She almost broke free, but Gabriel arrived in time to grab one of her arms.

  “Calm down,” he said. “I told you, we’re not going to hurt you.”

  The woman continued to struggle.

  “Relax,” Gabriel said.

  “We’re trying to save your life,” Nyla told her.

  Whether it was Nyla’s words or because the woman was losing strength, she finally stopped struggling. Eyes narrowing, she said, “I don’t believe you.”

  “We’re telling the truth,” Gabriel said. “The survival stations are really death traps. If you go in, you don’t come out again.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because the people who are running them are the same ones who planted the shipping containers full of Sage Flu around the world. This is their way to finish what they started.”

  The woman looked stunned. “How can you know this?”

  “We’ve been trying to stop them for a long time,” Nyla said.

  “You didn’t do a very good job, then.”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “You want me to believe you,” the survivor said, “prove it.”

  This was not the first time someone had said this, so Gabriel and Nyla were prepared.

  “I’m going to pull my phone out of my pocket,” Nyla said. “Okay?”

  The woman nodded.

  Nyla retrieved her phone, pulled up the video shot a few days before on a scouting trip to the stadium, and turned the screen so the man could see. On the trip, the closest she and Gabriel had been able to get was a hill right beyond the parking area, straight out from the back end of the stadium. This was the only part of the structure where there was no double-deck seating, just two sets of much smaller bleachers, one behind left field and one behind right.

  Though the angle of the video was a bit acute, it clearly showed two large fenced-in areas on the playing field, with several people in each.

  Nyla said, “We know from information gained about other survival stations that those are detention areas. They place people who are obviously sick in one, and those who are not in the other.”

  “But isn’t that what they should do?” the survivor asked.

  “Hold on.” Nyla sped up the image until it zoomed in on a portion of the grandstands, and then she let the video play again. The picture moved around some because the zoom was so extreme, but there was no mistaking the man holding the rifle, facing the field. “Separating the ill and the non-ill does make sense, but putting them behind locked fences with razor wire on top and surrounding them with well-armed guards doesn’t. The survivors go to these stations of their own free will. They want the help. They’re not going to put up a fight, so why treat them like they would?”

  “I…I don’t know. But they must have their reasons.”

  “Then how about this? No survivors have left the stadium, and yet the amount of people in each detention area has dropped dramatically.”

  “That’s not proof,” the woman said. “You could be making that up.”

  “True,” Nyla replied. “And there are other things I could tell you that you may or may not believe.”

  “Did you see the video on TV?” Gabriel asked.

  “Why do you think I’m here?” the woman responded.

  “I don’t mean the video that claims to be a message from the UN. I’m talking about the one that went up several days go from that reporter who used to be with PCN.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Nyla was already shuffling through her phone. She found Tamara Costello’s video and hit PLAY.

  The woman watched, rapt, as Tamara explained what was really going on.

  When the video ended, she stared at the screen for several seconds before saying, “I don’t know. I don’t…”

  Nyla watched her for a moment, then glanced at Gabriel and nodded. They both took a few steps back, giving the woman space.

  “If you want to continue on, we won’t stop you,” Nyla said.

  The woman shifted her gaze between the two of them.

  “My…my friends are there,” she said. “We were supposed to meet there. I…I…”

  Gabriel’s chest tightened. “When did they go there?”

  “New Year’s Eve.”

  A week before.

  Gabriel wanted to say something comforting, but he thought the woman’s friends were likely dead.

  She stared at the ground, and when she looked up again, her eyes were hard and determined. “Can you show me?”

  “That’s probably not a good idea.”

  “You want me to believe you? Show me.”

  Nyla considered the request. “Gabriel can take you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “If it saves your life, we’re happy to do it.” Nyla held out her hand. “I’m Nyla.”

  The woman shook it. “Martina.”

  MARTINA GABLE DIDN’T know what to think. Were Nyla and Gabriel telling her the truth? Was it possible the UN message had been a fake? That its purpose had been
to take even more lives? Only a few short weeks ago, that would have sounded like conspiracy-theory bullshit. But a few short weeks ago, there hadn’t been survival stations and the release of a virus that had killed who knew how much of the human race.

  And then there was the video from that Tamara Costello. Martina had seen the reports the woman did during the spring outbreak. The news said the woman had died during the mini-epidemic, but clearly she had not. Her words, more than anything else, were what kept Martina from marching up to the front door of Dodger Stadium right then.

  Until she had more proof, she’d keep her guard up, something she’d stopped doing the last few days.

  When she had finally caught up to the woman driving Ben’s Jeep, and been told Ben was dead, Martina had slipped into a state of despair. She still couldn’t remember where she had gone or what she had done in the forty-eight hours that followed. Her family, most of the people she knew, and then Ben. It was too much.

  After she finally began to pull out of her funk the day before, she’d found herself near the ocean in Santa Monica. She had wandered out onto the pier, passed the arcade games and amusement-park rides, to the very end, where she leaned against the railing and stared out at the vast, empty sea.

  She knew she had a choice: she could either give up or take control again and live. In the face of all the loss caused by the pandemic, could giving up be considered a weak decision? She vacillated on the answer for a while, but as more of the fog lifted from her brain, she saw the truth. Giving up would be weak. She had to live. If not for herself then for those she knew who had died. Besides, she still had friends who were alive. Friends, she realized, who were not far from where she was at that very moment.

  Her first thought, of course, had been of Noreen and Riley and Craig, but she didn’t know where they were. What she did know, though, was where they would eventually go, if they hadn’t already—the survival station at Dodger Stadium.

  She figured the stadium couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen miles away at most, so that afternoon she had walked off the pier and headed east, deciding to go on foot and use the time to fully clear her mind. She grew tired not long after sunset, so she found an apartment free of the smell of death and collapsed onto a couch in the living room.

  It was as dark when she woke as it had been when she’d lain down. She checked her watch and saw it was about ten minutes to one in the morning. There was no question of going back to sleep, though. The anticipation of seeing her friends again would not allow it.

  She hit the road and walked alone through the darkened streets. Alone, that was, until she’d heard Gabriel behind her.

  Now here she was walking beside him into a hilly neighborhood north of Sunset Boulevard.

  “I thought I was closer to the stadium than this,” she said after they’d been hiking for a while.

  “You were, well, are. It’s over there.” He pointed to the right. “We’re going around to the backside. Same place we shot the video. Best view.”

  The sun began to rise as they headed up a ridge road. The left side was lined with homes, and the right with a narrow valley filled mostly with trees and grass.

  They continued until the valley began to close.

  “Going off road now, so watch your step,” Gabriel said.

  He led her down the slope, staying under the trees to avoid the open grass areas. At the bottom, they came to a four-lane street.

  Gabriel paused under the trees and scanned the road before whispering, “Quick across.”

  In a sprint, he led her to the other side and up the eastern slope. At the top, they crossed a smaller road and moved rapidly through a cluster of buildings. A sign identified the area as the Los Angeles Police Academy. Unlike most of the other places Martina had seen, the parking lot was jam-packed with cars gathering dust. She guessed they belonged to recruits and active officers who had been called to a duty they never completed.

  She and Gabriel moved down the edge of a clearing, then along a trail that paralleled the main road, and passed another building complex before finally stopping.

  “We’ll cross here and go up that hill,” he whispered, pointing at the land on the other side of the road. “Follow exactly where I go, and if I motion for you to get down, don’t hesitate.”

  “I won’t.”

  He checked the road in both directions, and then sprinted across. Martina followed right behind, matching Gabriel step for step. Once more under the cover of trees, they climbed the small slope and headed south until the hill began to descend again. Through the branches, she could see glimpses of the large parking area and the stadium, but her view was too obstructed for her to make out many details.

  Gabriel knelt and removed his pack. From inside, he pulled out a pair of binoculars and motioned for Martina to follow him. Staying in a crouch, they worked their way to the right until most of the foliage in front of them cleared away, and then stretched out on the ground.

  There it was. Dodger Stadium, the banks of seats brightly lit by the morning sun.

  Gabriel looked through the binoculars, adjusted the magnification, and handed them to Martina.

  She raised the glasses to her eyes.

  “Concentrate on the center,” he instructed. “Over that black barrier separating the two outfield bleachers. Like I said before, the angle isn’t perfect, but…well, just look.”

  The eye line he suggested allowed her to see a portion of the outfield area and all of the infield, or at least where they used to be. Now, like she’d seen on the video, there were fences cutting across the grass and dirt, with posts hammered into the field.

  “They look empty,” she said, taking in the two larger areas.

  “What do?”

  “The…detention areas? Is that what you called them?”

  “The first few days they were pretty full, but after Tamara’s video knocked that phony UN message off the air, the number of new arrivals decreased considerably. Out of those who still came, we’ve been able to get to most of them first.” He paused. “Now look around the grandstands. Lower deck, top end, right before it disappears.”

  Martina focused in on the seats and slowly began to pan across the stadium. “What am I looking—” She froze.

  “You see them?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dead center in her binoculars, facing the playing field, was a soldier with a rifle. She searched some more and found others, all facing the field. It was all exactly as Nyla and Gabriel had said. Granted, none of it proved this wasn’t a UN operation, but her doubt was beginning to fade.

  She refocused back on the field and noticed something she’d missed before. “There’s another fenced-in area in the outfield.”

  “As far as we can tell, it’s a special holding area. It went up a few days after the survival station opened.”

  “Why is it covered like that?”

  “We’re not sure. Maybe so people in the other enclosures can’t see inside.”

  “Maybe my friends are in there,” she said.

  “I don’t want to get your hopes up,” he said. “It’s more likely they were put in one of the other two. If any of them were sick, they would have been in the one to the left, the rest in the other.”

  “They’re immune so they wouldn’t have been put in the sick one,” she said.

  He silently cursed Nyla for putting him in the position of dealing with this. “Most of those who have survived are simply lucky, not immune.”

  “I realize that. But we’re all immune. We had the flu.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”

  “We were all sick, you know, during the outbreak last spring. I’m pretty sure it made us all immune.”

  “How many friends are we talking about?” he asked.

  “Well, there were nine of us, but me and three of the others headed north to look for my boyfriend.”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “He had the flu, too.”

  “And you know
for a fact he’s still alive?”

  Water glistened in her eyes. “He was. He’d left messages for me on my phone. But…” She fell silent, remembering what the woman on the road had told her.

  “These five other friends of yours,” Gabriel said after a moment. “They’re the ones who went to the survival station on New Year’s Eve.”

  “Yes.”

  He stared out at the stadium, then whispered, “Is that what it’s for?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He looked at her as if he hadn’t realized he’d spoken out loud. “The special enclosure. I was just…well…see, none of the other survivor stations have reported a similar space. But that would make sense, wouldn’t it? Los Angeles is the closest station to the spring outbreak. If those who had survived the spring outbreak are actually immune, this would be the station they would come to. So once Project Eden realized it, I would think they’d want to separate them from the other survivors.”

  “Who is Project Eden?”

  “That’s the people running the stations.”

  “So you’re saying you think my friends could be in there.”

  He hesitated, and then nodded. “I think it’s a possibility.”

  She lowered the binoculars, but kept her eyes on the stadium. “We have to get them out.”

  “I might be wrong. There’s a good chance they aren’t there. Besides, there are only eight of us here. That means those guys with the rifles outnumber us more than two to one.”

  “Not eight. Nine. You’re forgetting about me.”

  Twenty-Two

  SURVIVAL STATION, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF BELINDA RAMSEY

  ENTRY DATE—JANUARY 7, 8:00 AM CST

  THE DOCTORS DIDN’T come back until this morning. Woke us up again just like yesterday. They read more names. Sixteen. This time no one else volunteered to join them.

  I don’t feel like writing anything more.

  Twenty-Three

  STATE OF RAJASTHAN, INDIA