“Yeah, actually. They were. Don’t think I’ve ever seen either of those two look happy. Check this out, they even brought in a couple of huge containers of really good coffee for us to use in the breakroom.”
Her gaze fell on her receipt for her glasses, which lay on the passenger seat. “Huh. Imagine that.”
“Yeah, thought you’d get a kick out of that. Listen, you can have an extra day off in addition to the seventy-two. Bailey and Waxler asked for some odd scheduling over the next eight weeks to accommodate their treatment schedules. Three days solid on, straight through, and three days off. They’re going to overlap each other after today, but it means I’ll be able to rotate everyone into schedules slightly resembling something normal again.”
Her bullshit meter was going off full blast now, but in this case she knew there was even less she could do about it than with her brother.
She opted to play it dumb. If this was legit after all, she didn’t want to fuck things up for Stu, or the other two men, if they were also involved with it. “Cool.”
“That’s what I said. Just wanted to call and give you the good news.”
“I appreciate it.” When she ended the call she stared at her phone for a long moment.
This couldn’t be legit. Whatever this was, it was more than just a secret research project for medication.
It was something bad.
Really bad.
She only hoped whatever it was didn’t bite Stu in the ass.
* * * *
Stu had written a quick schedule on the bottom of the note she’d left for him. He’d then tacked it to Shasta’s bedroom door.
On the bottom, he’d signed off with, Love you, and Mom and Dad. :)
She cooked dinner and had it ready when her dad arrived home a little after seven that night.
More shocking, Stu arrived a few minutes after their father did. Which shouldn’t have surprised her, because he’d indicated he’d be back that evening, but it was more his literal appearance that had surprised her.
He looked good, had gotten a haircut, and was dressed in decent clothes.
Frankly, he looked better than he had since getting home from his time in the service.
“Wow, son,” their dad said. “That’s quite a change. You look good.”
“I feel great!” He slid into a chair and Shasta realized she’d better speak up sooner rather than later so he knew the cover story she’d spun for him.
“I told Mom and Dad this morning about your new job at the VA,” she said. “That you might be spending some nights there.”
Even Stu’s mental acuity was far sharper than normal. Usually, she would expect a blank look, or a confused, “Huh?” but he immediately grinned. “Thanks, sis.” He turned to their father. “Things are going to get better. I promise.”
“You’re not using anymore?” her Dad asked, doubt thick in his tone.
“Like I told sis, this stuff they’re giving me is great. I really think it’s going to help me.”
“Why do you have to stay at the VA sometimes?” he asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Monitoring,” he immediately lied. She spotted the lie. She’d been able to tell he was lying ever since he was ten, by the way his left eye would twitch. But usually a lie was accompanied by an unconscious pause before he spoke the lie, as if trying to convince himself of its veracity before laying it on others.
The eye twitch was there. She spotted it even with her crappy vision. But their father had been looking down at his plate and missed it.
Stu met her gaze and dropped her a conspiratorial wink.
Creepy.
* * * *
Her mom had eaten at work but was happy to discover when she arrived home a little after nine that Stu was home again.
She was even happier when she got to talk to him…and saw his clean room.
Before her parents headed to bed, her mom gave Shasta a hug. “Honey, maybe he really has changed. Still, I promise, I won’t budge if he screws up. This is his last chance.”
“Okay, Mom.”
When it was the two of them alone in the living room, Shasta sank onto the other end of the couch. “I covered for your ass,” she muttered to Stu. “I don’t like lying to them. Don’t fuck this up and break their hearts. Or mine,” she reluctantly added.
He looked at her and it seemed like he was really paying attention, not just giving her lip service. Like he was more there than he’d been in…well, a couple of years.
“I promise, sis. This time, it’s different.”
“What if they stop giving you the meds?”
“They won’t. Even after they can start full testing, we’ll still get them. They promised, and it’s in the contract I signed.”
“But what if they aren’t approved?”
“Oh, that’s just a formality. The stupid FDA. They’ll get approval for it, especially once they start officially working with the VA.”
“VA? I made that up.”
“But it’s the truth. They told me they want to get in with the VA to help treat soldiers. That’s why they’re using me. I can point them toward people who need this help.”
She couldn’t help the creepy sensation in her gut that there was something really wrong about all of this. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said. “I only want you to be happy and healthy, but I have to put Mom and Dad first.”
“I know. And I love you for it. I’m sorry I’ve been fucking things up.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that.” She reached out and patted his arm. “Love you, bro.” And she meant that. She did love her little brother, even if he had infuriated her over the past couple of years.
“Love you, too, sis.”
She headed for bed, trying to shake her unease.
Maybe I’m so used to the status quo that I can’t accept change when it’s clearly right there.
She didn’t know what was really going on, but it spooked the crap out of her the way he was acting.
And she totally got the irony there, that Stu was finally acting like the brother she’d wished he’d be, and here she was, worrying that he was possessed or into something bad.
Maybe I’m the one with the problem now. That certainly would be ironic.
Forcing it out of her brain for the time being, she tried to go to sleep.
Chapter Seven
Early Sunday afternoon, Rev. Hannibal Silo, head of the Church of the Rising Sunset, smiled down at his flock filling the sanctuary at the St. Louis compound. The crowd had overflowed into the entryway and even outside. Fortunately, Jerald had the foresight to anticipate this potential issue and had large outdoor monitors installed for anyone who couldn’t get inside. They’d opened these services not just to people living inside the compound, but anyone in the St. Louis area. Since there was no reported Kite in the area, as long as everyone cleared a stick test, they were allowed inside.
Silo figured it was an easy way to also let the faithful see what they were missing by not getting on board and applying to live inside the stronghold.
For a nominal fee, of course. In addition to their monthly fee.
Heavy on the tradesmen, obviously. And medical professionals.
This afternoon he was filming the service—rather, the church’s network was filming it—and it was being broadcast live to the much larger main sanctuary at the Albuquerque church. It would be packaged and rebroadcast later in other markets.
One small comfort—in the very front row, smiling up at him, sat Marianne Parnassus and her three children. Marianne’s husband, Bill, a junior senator from Ohio, wasn’t there.
He was still in Washington, DC.
He was also firmly under Hannibal’s thumb. Mainly because of the video Silo had of Parnassus getting blown by one of his married executive assistants.
A male married executive assistant.
He wasn’t the only politico in DC Silo had dirt on. His other ace in the hole was Senator Tom Davis. Silo had ov
er six explicit hours of video of that sophomore senator from Illinois taking it up the ass from a sixteen-year-old male prostitute.
Even better, Davis had contacts within the CIA.
It was difficult for Hannibal to keep the smile on his face when around him his world and plans were going to shit, but he tried. If anyone noticed anything amiss, he could point—accurately—to his most pressing concern.
His wife of nearly forty years was still missing.
Although his flock wouldn’t understand the true reasons behind why that pissed him right the fuck off, he could still use their sympathy to his advantage.
Hell, he’d been using it to his advantage to solicit donations. Which was a damned good thing, because, thanks to the fucking President and her new Kite Virus Czar, the church’s online donations had plummeted.
He’d been in St. Louis almost a full month now and they were still no closer to locating his cunt of a wife. Still more videos had been released online by the blogger helping her. Debunking them was harder every time. Trying to get the website shut down hadn’t worked either, because it kept cropping up within minutes at a new server.
All attempts to track the blogger down had proven futile, although they’d come achingly close in Atlanta.
Then she’d slipped through their fingers again. At least, they thought the blogger was a woman. That was the information they had, but the team sent after her had disappeared, as had their best “consultant” hacker.
His bets were on the Drunk Monkeys, or another SOTIF team, being behind those disappearances. He couldn’t even confide that to Jerald, because he’d gone behind Jerald’s back to hire the team in the first place, and he’d authorized them to use whatever methods were necessary to get information about the blogger and locate her. They’d killed the woman’s two roommates during the interrogation process. He hadn’t even told Jerald about that team. To admit it after the fact might be…awkward.
Add to that the sudden “suicide” of Dr. Isley. Hannibal wasn’t sure if Jerald had hired that out or done it himself, and poking around in it might garner him the wrong kind of notice by Jerald.
If Jerald was capable of committing a murder and successfully making it look like a suicide, Hannibal knew he’d need to tread very carefully around the man.
Now Hannibal was left standing there with his dick in his hand and hoping there was a break in the search soon. Cops were no longer focused on finding Mary due to the Kite virus marching its way east from California toward New Mexico. The only clues the police had was that she left alone, under her own power, with no evidence that she was abducted or forced to leave against her will.
That meant they considered it not their problem.
Goddamned cunt.
Not even bumping the reward to over one hundred thousand dollars had produced results.
Add to the mix, he’d discovered more of his informants had suspiciously gone “missing.”
The President was no longer under his thumb.
His lab in St. Louis hadn’t yet come up with a Kite vaccine.
About the only thing going right so far were their distributions of the Kite drug in the Houston area. Already, one of his “whales” had approached him to confirm their family’s spot in the Houston stronghold, and had offered to tithe even more money to the church if that would…help.
In public, duh, Silo knew he had to be all about supporting the President, supporting the race to find a vaccine for the Kite virus, yadda yadda, blah blah blah.
In his almost forty years in the ministry, he’d never been stymied so.
It flat-out pissed him off.
And it all started with those fucking Drunk Monkeys. If they hadn’t interfered with his plans, he would have had Dr. Quong—and likely others—safely in his lab, working for him. He’d have a vaccine by now, and he’d have a lock on a Presidential run.
Mary only made it worse.
I should have killed that cunt off years ago.
* * * *
Jerald Arbeid, Hannibal Silo’s assistant, sat on the stage behind his boss and idly wondered about the best way to kill the man.
Oh, nothing Jerald was planning on doing right away. He had to keep the guy alive for a while, at least until they found Mary Silo.
Unfortunately, she had to die, too.
With both of them confirmed dead, then Jerald could take over the daily operations of the billion-dollar behemoth that was now the Church of the Rising Sunset. Might take a while to rebound from this PR hit, but he knew he could stick some new figurehead in front of the cameras and build the church back up again to something resembling its former glory.
Meanwhile, he had to keep Hannibal so busy chasing his own tail and try to derail any other harebrained schemes the man might come up with that his boss wouldn’t have time or energy to think about double-crossing him and kicking him out.
They were locked in a deadly chess match at the moment, even though Hannibal thought he was a few up on Jerald. What Hannibal didn’t realize was that Jerald had full surveillance inside Hannibal’s office and quarters in St. Louis.
There wasn’t much the man could do that Jerald didn’t know about.
Jerald preferred it that way, Hannibal thinking he had the upper hand.
Less work for Jerald to do in the long run. All he had to do was sit back and wait and follow along, cleaning up anything that happened. Mary Silo’s disappearance had been an unexpected development, but maybe for the best in the long run. It would allow the reverend to have a “sudden illness” that took him out of the game for good.
And since Hannibal had done such a great job beforehand of fooling everyone into thinking Mary was some fragile little snowflake, it wouldn’t be a shocker when she died shortly after her “rescue.” Or, maybe, even as a tragically direct result of it.
Whatever.
He wasn’t picky at this point. All Jerald knew was he couldn’t let this idiot in the pulpit ruin his years of hard work behind the scenes to make the Church of the Rising Sunset great. He never should have floated the idea of being President past Silo. Jerald didn’t want to be an apocalypse engineer. He’d simply wanted money, power, prestige, and the freedom to move at will behind the scenes to make that happen.
Was that too much to ask?
And he’d had all of that until he opened his big mouth and suggested Hannibal try to run for President.
What’d been a throwaway thought at the time, idle musing more than anything, Hannibal had seized upon it and decreed it would be so.
Followed by the other harebrained schemes.
Jerald had been leery of trying to put his foot down and put the brakes on his boss’ plans, thinking the man would, surely, eventually talk himself out of them and see reason.
Nope. Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.
Fucker wasn’t smart enough to fight his way out of a brown paper bag, and he thought he was seriously going to engineer a new generation of offspring who’d repopulate the earth?
Jerald had humored him, though. When caught up in Hannibal’s whirlwind, it was easy to be swept away by his enthusiasm.
While Jerald hadn’t agreed with Hannibal’s reasoning, he’d been okay going along with all of it.
Until LA blew up, literally.
Barstow.
That was bringing death and destruction to US shores on a scale Jerald knew wasn’t smart. Where before they’d been working on a controlled spread of the Kite virus, taking out key population centers where they didn’t have a strong voter base, Hannibal simply wanted to wipe out everyone not inside the strongholds.
That’s when Jerald knew he had to respond. The country’s infrastructure wouldn’t survive if they let Kite wipe out the “unwashed.” It just wouldn’t. They’d be wide open and vulnerable to attack by any half-baked despot able to get his hands on nuclear weapons just lying around and waiting to be picked up.
Pakistan and India were two countries coming to mind.
No, the US military h
ad to survive. That meant Jerald had to keep Hannibal from spreading the virus throughout the country the way he wanted to. Delay him long enough that the scientists at the CDC could finally crack the code and get a vaccine in place.
Of course, if their scientists had come up with the vaccine first it would have been a feather in Hannibal’s political cap, but that damn ship had sailed.
Fortunately, Hannibal seemed to remain completely clueless about that fact.
For his own health and safety, Jerald knew he needed to keep Hannibal clueless until the very last moment.
Maybe he could engineer a very touching death for Hannibal and Mary both. Spin it that she survived long enough to be reunited with her beloved husband, who succumbed to the stress after her return to him.
Jerald kept tuning out Hannibal while he considered that plan. Yes, the parishioners would eat that shit up with a spoon. How romantic, how sweet, a forty-year marriage and they died almost together.
Of course, Jerald would leave out the part about Hannibal being a sociopathic sexual sadist. That would completely foul the narrative.
He’d honestly thought it’d be more difficult than it had been to convince people that the “evidence” was doctored. Sure, the mainstream media and law enforcement were skeptical, but the church members had united behind Hannibal. Scheduled donations set up on auto-pay were holding steady and even climbing a little. It was the online and new member donations that had slumped.
That’s where the President and her damned Kite Virus Czar, Dr. Rev. Norman Karsu, had fucked them over. The damned Methodist physician had convinced people not to donate to churches unless they were local and they knew where the money was being used. To volunteer instead of donate. To use the money for their families.
Assholes.
He wished he still had a mole deep enough in the military that he could have them take a direct swipe at General Arliss. Jerald knew the man had engineered the whole thing, from eliminating any witnesses they had against the President and her family, to the President making the speech admitting her daughter had an abortion…
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