The Project Eden Thrillers Box Set 1: Books 1 - 3 (Sick, Exit 9, & Pale Horse)

by Brett Battles

  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.

  Twenty-Five

  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 walking 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.

  “What did you do?” Ryan asked.

  Sean jumped back from the container. “Nothing. Just trying to open the door.”

  The hum dropped lower and lower in both tone and volume.

  “What’s going on?” Dani asked.

  “It, uh, sounds like it’s shutting down,” Ryan told her.

  “You mean, you did it?”

  “We didn’t do anything,” Sean said. “I tried the door, but others have done that, too, and nothing happened then.”

  “Maybe our container’s different,” she suggested.

  “I guess it could be,” Sean said, but he didn’t believe it. Why would it be?

  Ryan popped around the corner. “Help me get up on top. I want to take a look inside.”

  “Use the door,” Sean suggested. With the brackets and hinges, it was as close to a ladder as they could get.

  Ryan climbed up and looked over the side.

  “Yeah. It’s off,” he said, not hiding his surprise. “I don’t know how, but it is.”

  Sean wanted to see, too, so he climbed up at the other corner.

  The two big fans sat side by side, aimed at the sky. Their blades were spinning more and more slowly until they came to a full stop.

  “I think I can get down there,” Sean said.

  If he was careful, he could maneuver through the blades. Below them on his side was an empty area more than wide enough for him to fit in.

  “Not sure that’s such a good idea,” Dani said.

  “Not sure it is, either,” Sean said, “but under the circumstances, if I can find out what happened, maybe we can use that to turn off the other ones.”

  The radio remained silent for a moment, then Dani said, “You’re clear to go in.”

  He glanced at Ryan. “You’ll have to help me.”

  Ryan stretched out along the edge above the door, and held out his hand. Sean grabbed it, and lowered himself through the fan. For a second he worried that it would turn back on and cut him in half, but it remained as dead as it looked. Once his feet hit the bottom, he let go of Ryan and took a look around.

  Most of the container seemed to be filled with large barrels that must have held the virus. He tapped on one and was surprised by the echo. It was empty.

  Well, of course, that made sense. The box had been dispersing its contents for quite a while now, so some of the barrels would have to be empty. He knocked on the ones next to it. They, too, echoed back.

  Frowning, he examined them for a moment, then used a small pair of cutters from his belt to hack through the tubes connected to the top of the first barrel.

  “What are you doing?” Ryan asked.

  Instead of answering, Sean cut the final tube, and tried to rock the barrel back and forth. Because of all the barrels on the other side, and the two metal straps that ran across the width of the container on his side, it didn’t move much.

  “Hand me your bolt cutters,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Just pass them down!”

  Ryan handed him the large cutters. Sean got the tool’s jaw around the edge of the upper strap and bit into it. It took him a few minutes, but he was able to cut the strap in two. He bent the sides out of the way. The lower strap proved easier to slice through, and he was able to part it in about half the time.

  No longer restrained, he yanked the barrel into the open space where he was standing, and squeezed around it into the spot where it had been. From there, he used the cutters to knock on all the barrels in the second row. Once he finished, he moved things around until he could reach the third row, then the row after that, and the row after that.

  When he was done with the final row, he took a deep breath.

  “Dani,” he said. “I know why it turned off.”

  “Why?”

  “It wasn’t anything we did. The damn thing is empty.”

  THE CONTAINER IN Dublin was not the first to shut off, nor was it the last. The first occurred in Wellington, New Zealand, in the parking lot of a small shopping center, precisely fifteen minutes before the one in Dublin. The last was twenty-seven minutes after Dublin, in Hawaii on the island of Oahu, just four blocks away from Waikiki Beach.

  A few of the containers had experienced misfires on certain barrels. The operating software had been designed to skip over these and move on to the next. For the most part, though, the contents of each IDM had been delivered in full.

  Twenty-Six

  LAS CRUCES, NEW MEXICO

  3:38 PM MOUNTAIN STANDARD TIME

  PEREZ WAS NOT surprised by anything in the president’s speech.

  The nature of the virus was bound to be discovered. But so what? No one would live long enough to develop a vaccine, let alone mass produce it in the quantities needed. And when the president said they would continue to try to find a way to turn off the IDMs, it might have sounded good, but in reality it meant next to nothing. By then, ninety-five percent of the virus had already been released, more than enough to achieve the Project’s goals.

  And now the containers were all off, causing even more concern and speculation around the world.

  As far as he was concerned, the more panic the better.

  Perez had shaken his head at Homeland Security’s list of suggested safety measures—seal off doors and windows, avoid contact with anyone not in the home with you, take frequent showers and wash hands every thirty minutes, and on and on and on. Measures that, along with the twenty-four-hour curfew that would be nearly impossible to enforce, might have worked if they’d gone into effect before the IDMs went active.

  But not now. The end was coming.

  There was a single knock on his door, and Claudia stuck her head in. “Dr. Lassiter would like to speak with you.”

  Perez smiled. Excellent. The doctor had saved him the effort of making the call himself.

  “Video?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you, Claudia.”

  As she left, he activated the video chat on his computer.

  Dr. Lassiter looked stressed and tired.

  “Good afternoon, Doctor. How can I help you?” Perez said.

  “I’ve been trying to get ahold of Patricia Nakamura for several hours with no success. The last time I called, a man I’ve never seen before came on and told me she was no longer with NB89. With, not at. Do you know what he’s talking about?”

  “Of course I do.”

  The doctor waited, but when Perez didn’t add anything, he said, “Then you need to tell me. I’m the acting chairman of the council.”

  “Patricia Nakamura is dead.”

  “What?” Whatever explanation Dr. Lassiter had been exp
ecting, that was not it.

  “She was a problem and had to be removed.”

  “You had her killed?”

  “An unfortunate necessity, but one my men handled efficiently.”

  “Your men?”

  “Project Eden Security.”

  “Those are our men. My men!” He paused. “Mr. Perez, I am placing you under arrest. You are to go to your quarters and—”

  “Dr. Lassiter,” Perez cut in. “I think I need to correct you on something you said earlier. You are no longer acting chairman of the council. That position has been dissolved, and the council itself has been transitioned into an advisory role for the Project’s principal director.”

  “The principal director? He’s alive?”

  Perez smiled. “Yes. I would say the director is alive and well.”

  “Oh, thank God.”

  “But I believe you’re confusing things again. The former PD that you’re thinking of is undoubtedly dead. I, on the other hand, am not.”

  “You? Don’t be ridiculous. You’re not the PD and you never will be.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Doctor. I’ve been in contact with nearly every Project facility, and it has been decided that this part of our plan needs a strong leader. A role, I’m sorry to say, you are not fit to fill. They have all agreed with my decision to take over.” It wasn’t completely true. While he had been in contact with most bases, he hadn’t actually asked for any endorsements. He just told them he would be the one running this phase of the Project, and they had gone along with it, as he knew they would. When it came time for the next phase and he was still in charge, they’d go along with that, too.

  “I don’t believe any of it,” the doctor said. “You are to step down, and break off all contact with the rest of the Project.”