She kept climbing, not wanting to fight a man who could redirect missiles in mid-flight.
Noah, I could really use some help right now.
The thought made her angry. She had survived too much to turn into a helpless little girl, waiting for daddy to come save her. Irritation turned to motivation, and she started leaping up the steps, three at a time, rising higher and higher.
Jarrod mounted the steps and started up after her.
The long climb ended at a landing right below the elevation gears. Jenna recognized where she was. Sophia had fallen to her death from an identical platform. There was only one more flight of stairs, ending at the door to the vertex room, and then there would be nowhere left to go.
Jarrod’s head came into view, rising above the landing’s lip. Jenna turned, ready to drive him back with a kick, but before she could, he raised his gun and fired. The bullet sizzled past her, striking something behind her with a metallic clang. Frigid white mist sprayed over the platform. The round had struck a tank of liquefied helium coolant. Jenna felt her exposed skin blister from the cold, and she leaped for the next flight of stairs before the freezing cloud reached out to engulf her.
Over the hiss of escaping gas, she heard the antenna creaking. Behind her, rivets and support beams made brittle by the arctic blast, began snapping apart.
But there was still only one way to go.
Up.
Jarrod burst out of the cloud, his face frosted white from the icy mist, lips frozen in a grimace of determination. He charged after her.
Jenna reached the uppermost landing a moment later. There were no more stairs to climb, but the crisscrossing metal support lattice beneath the dish was within reach.
Just like the monkey bars on a playground, she thought, and without hesitation, she swung out onto it.
The lattice might have posed no challenge for a nimble ten-year old Jenna, but it had been years since she’d been on a playground, and the last twenty-four hours had taken a toll. Or had they? Despite the pain in her foot and the breathlessness from her current situation, she didn’t feel like she’d spent the past 24 hours on the run. She looked down at her biceps. The knife wound was gone. She remembered a past that had never happened. What else about the past day was different? Her mind spun with the possibilities, but there wasn’t time to dwell. She entered the jungle gym, moving through the maze of metal beams as fast as she could.
It was like climbing the wrong side of a ladder, each rung taking her further out above a deadly drop. She glimpsed Jarrod on the landing, saw him hesitate for a moment and then take aim with the pistol.
A bullet sparked off the dish right above her, so close that she could feel the heat of the impact against her skin. She kept climbing and before Jarrod could get another shot off, she heaved herself up onto the rim of the dish and slid into the bowl. She lay there on her back, motionless, willing Jarrod to just give up and leave. Then she noticed a buzzing sound that she’d become familiar with in the Everglades. Cort’s drone had come around for a second strike. She pictured it above, flying in circles, its electronic eyes searching for targets.
Jenna searched for an escape route, but found nothing.
“You haven’t accomplished anything,” a voice rasped—Jarrod, from just above. Jenna looked up and saw him, perched on the rim of the dish, staring down at her. His expression shifted through a spectrum of emotions—anger, pain, disappointment…and triumph.
Jenna faced him. “The rest will never know if the signal went out. World War III isn’t going to happen.”
“It won’t matter. All the pieces are in place. When they don’t hear from me, they’ll go ahead with the plan. You haven’t stopped us.”
Jenna felt a coal of anger and defiance grow hot within her. “I stopped you.”
Jarrod spat out a derisive laugh. “Not really.” He hooked his left elbow over the edge of the dish and then reached back to draw his pistol from its holster.
Jenna looked about for cover. There were plenty of places that might shield her, but for how long?
Run toward a gun…
The coal flared into a wildfire of determination. Jenna hurled herself at Jarrod.
She saw his eyes—eyes that were new, but identical to her own—go wide in disbelief. He pulled the trigger, nearly point blank, but the bullet pinged off the dish to the left, a ninety degree angle from the direction he’d fired.
The pistol fell from his fingers as he threw his arms out to brace himself against her charge. An impact stopped her attack midair and flung her backwards. She landed on the dish’s incline and slid to the bottom.
When she looked up to where Jarrod had been, he was gone. She found him above her. In the air. He jumped!
Jenna rolled to the side as Jarrod landed, punching down hard and pushing some kind of psychokinetic force in front of his fist. The metal panel bent inward, leaving a basketball-sized impact crater. Had she still been lying there when...
Reflexes overcame Jenna’s surprise. She kicked out hard, swiping Jarrod’s legs out from under him. While he toppled backwards, she got back to her feet—and ran.
Every other footfall sent pain through her leg and left a bloody splotch on the metal beneath her, but she charged up the dish’s incline.
“You can’t get away,” Jarrod said, his voice close behind her, exactly where she hoped he’d be.
Jenna pushed off the dish, spinning around backwards and kicking out hard. Her heel connected with the side of Jarrod’s head, sending him sprawling. It was her turn to leap. While she didn’t know how to punch the way he could, she could sure as hell knock him unconscious.
But he saw her coming, and in midflight, he reached out and swatted her from the air without ever touching her. She rolled across the dish, more angry than wounded. She wanted to curse at him, to call him a coward, but her training did its job, stepping in and calming her down.
As Jarrod got to his feet, she thought, I’m the same as him. No, I’m better than him. An old playground phrase, uttered by the girls in her class after the drama teacher had them perform Annie Get Your Gun, came to mind. “Whatever you can do, I can do better.”
Before Jarrod could fully understand, Jenna swept her hand toward him, imagining an invisible extension of herself sweeping through the air. She had no idea how psychokinesis worked, but like her desire to reach the VLA, she hoped the knowledge had been built into her DNA.
Things went wrong, even before the arc of her swing reached Jarrod. Two of the four support beams holding up the telescope’s Volkswagen Bug-sized receiver bent and snapped as her arm swung past. With a groan, the remaining supports bowed to the lopsided tug and fell, tearing free from their mounts.
Jenna was forced to abort her attack, and she dove away from the falling supports. The entire dish shook as the receiver and all four supports, weighing several tons, crumpled inward. The dish shook like a struck gong, but Jenna rolled to her knees and turned toward Jarrod’s last position.
He wasn’t there. Instead, he was closer. While she had dived away from him, he had lunged forward. Jarrod dove over the fallen support, wrapped his fingers around Jenna’s neck and fell atop her. His fingers grew tighter, stopping the flow of blood to her brain. She’d be unconscious in seconds. Moving instinctually, she didn’t try to repel him with a psychokinetic attack. Instead, she clasped her hands together and drove them up between his arms like a wedge. His arms separated. The pressure on her neck reduced, but he remained locked in place, crushing the life out of her.
Her mind registered the high pitched buzz of a drone turning and flying away. She knew what was coming, and remembered Noah’s instructions when the boat exploded. She lowered her fighting hands, let her body go slack, closed her eyes and opened her mouth.
The pressure on her neck reduced, Jarrod no doubt thinking he’d killed her, that is, until she brought her hands to the sides of her head and covered her ears.
If Jarrod had reacted to her strange behavior, she didn’t
see it. The missile finished it’s silent approach just a second after she covered her ears. The violent upheaval flung Jarrod away from her, and shook her body from below, knocking the wind from her lungs. Despite the lack of air, her blood reached her brain once again and her thoughts became clearer, even as the world around her fell apart.
She rolled over and was surprised to find the dish intact. Smoke rolled up over the sides, collecting beneath the hanger’s high ceiling. With a groan of metal, the dish tilted a few degrees. Nine stories below, the concrete base, struck by a missile, succumbed to the weight of the hundred-ton dish. It heeled over, lazily at first, but gravity pulled it faster with each passing second.
When the dish reached a forty-five degree angle, Jenna slid to a stop against a fallen receiver support beam. A moment later, Jarrod rolled to a stop, just feet away. She steeled herself for an attack, but when he looked at her, he said, “We can stop it!”
The antenna continued to fall. She didn’t reply.
“I can’t do it alone!” he shouted.
“We could both die,” she suggested.
He stared at her, no doubt weighing her sincerity. “Without you, they don’t stand a chance.”
He was manipulating her. She knew it. He knew it. But he was also right. To stop the other clones and a third world war, she had to survive this mess, and that meant working with Jarrod...so that they could try killing each other again once they reached the ground.
“Tell me what to do,” she said.
He pointed his hands down, toward the dish. “Just focus on the dish. See it slowing. There’s no way we can stop it completely. It’s too heavy. But we can slow it down.” He closed his eyes and ground his teeth. The structure shuddered, mashed against an unseen force, but it continued to fall.
Jenna closed her eyes and did as instructed. She immediately felt the dish’s weight pulling against her. It was agonizing, like muscles in her mind were being stretched and snapped.
She screamed.
And the dish slowed.
We’re doing it, she thought, and she opened her eyes.
That was when she saw the third missile and shouted.
Jarrod’s eyes snapped open. He saw the missile,too. “No!” He reached out a hand, deflecting the missile to detonate in the desert, but he lost control of the dish in the process. The strain became to much for Jenna to bear alone, and she lost her psychokinetic grip.
With a groan of rending metal, the dish plummeted. Jarrod fell from view. Jenna clung to the support beam as long as she could, but momentum pulled her free and flung her away. The world became a blurry spiral, and then, in a snap, became nothing.
63
6:32 p.m.
“Jenna?”
The voice called to her out of the blackness.
“A few more minutes,” she murmured.
That’s all I need. I’ll sleep for a few more minutes. Then I’ll get up.
But unconsciousness had already released her back into the world of the living. Her eyelids fluttered open just in time to see a familiar shape kneel beside her.
“Jenna.” Noah sounded very concerned, and as she pondered possible reasons for this, the memory of the collapsing dish replayed in her head, but the final impact however was a blank spot in her memory.
She opened her eyes and couldn’t make sense of what she saw. Destruction lay all around her and above her, but a ten foot circle around her remained unscathed. It was as though the dish had slammed into a spherical force field, wrapping its hundred ton metal form around it. What happened?
She hurt, all over, but she decided that was a good sign. Serious injuries would have left her numb with shock. She tried to sit up.
“Lie still,” Noah told her, his voice soothing but still somehow ominous.
How bad is it? She wondered, and she decided that, sensible or not, she was going to get up. Noah didn’t try to stop her, and that, she decided, was probably a good sign, too.
As soon as she was partially upright, the world spun. There were two Noahs kneeling in front of her, and behind them, the flat desert landscape appeared strangely broken, like two transparent pictures imperfectly arranged on a desktop. Other than that, things looked pretty normal. After a few moments, the two images came together and she could see clearly again.
That was when she saw him at the edge of the untouched sphere of land.
A dark wave of grief crashed over Jenna, threatening to drag her back into unconsciousness. Jarrod—a part of Jarrod—lay a few feet away. When the edge of the dish had impacted the ground, it had sliced through his torso like a guillotine. He lay there, staring up, his too-familiar face frozen in a rictus of horror. The rest of him was buried in the rubble.
He tried to kill me, she thought. I should be glad he’s dead. But instead, it felt like a piece of her had been torn away.
Noah’s arms enfolded her. “It’s okay, Jenna. It’s over. You’re safe.”
Over? She shook her head, making no effort to hold back the tears. “No. I failed. I couldn’t stop him in time.”
“Shhh. Don’t worry about that now. You did what you could. You did more than anyone had the right to ask you to do. And I’m proud of you.”
Jenna was surprised by how much that mattered to her. Yet, she didn’t deserve his pride. When the chance to act had come, she had balked, torn between doing what she knew to be right—what Noah had raised her to believe in—and a preprogrammed sense of loyalty to a family she didn’t know.
If the world destroyed itself in the next few weeks, would it be her fault for not doing more? And if it destroyed itself gradually over the next fifty years, would that be her fault, too?
Soter appeared behind Noah, hobbling toward them as fast as he could manage. Jenna saw the look of relief mixed with wonderment in the old man’s eyes turn to hurt as he glimpsed Jarrod’s body and the state of the dish around her. Then he, too, was kneeling beside her.
Cort, on his crutches, was just a few seconds behind. “Did you do it? Did you stop him?” His eyes flicked back and forth between Jenna and the destroyed dish.
“Damn it, Cort,” Noah rasped. “Give her a minute.”
Jenna shrugged away from Noah, stood and got in Cort’s face. “You didn’t need to send in an airstrike! The signal was already sent! It was too late, you son of a bitch.”
Cort squinted at her. “Did you get there before or after the signal was sent?”
Noah stepped between them. “You almost killed her. She has a right to be pissed. Back off. Now.”
Jenna was angry, but she hadn’t forgotten the stakes. “I took his computer before he could e-mail the others.”
“Where is it?” Cort asked.
“It’s in the—” She trailed off when she realized that the truck and everything in it had been pulverized beneath the collapsing antenna. She turned toward the mass of destruction. “You destroyed it.”
Cort sagged against his crutches. “Well, there’s going to be hell to pay, but at least we can scratch that one off the list.” He jerked a thumb in Jarrod’s direction. “Hopefully this will mean the end of the cyber-terror attacks.”
Despite his coarse manner, Jenna found his statement strangely comforting. Something good had come out of it after all. Jarrod, and Sophia too, might have been only small parts in a grand design, but without them, the whole would be that much less effective.
Jarrod had warned her that the plan would go ahead, even if he was unable to contact the others, but maybe that wouldn’t happen right away. Maybe there was still time to stop the others—her brothers and sisters—from throwing the world into chaos.
And if she could accomplish that, maybe there would be time to save the world from itself.
Noah stood and held her. She savored Noah’s embrace a moment, then turned and faced Cort again.
“I got a look at his contact list. It’s not much, but it’s a place to start. We can find the others. Stop them.” Her eyes were drawn to Jarrod’s corpse. “Maybe even
save them from themselves.”
Cort regarded her with an almost predatory curiosity. “We? There is no ‘we.’”
Noah stepped between them again, hands on hips in a fatherly posture. “Jenna, your part in this is done.”
She shook her head. “I know them. I know how they think, and I know why they’re doing it. I’m the only one who can stop them.”
Cort laughed. “How are you going to stop them?”
Jenna looked up at the bent dish above them. She could do more than even she knew. It filled her with confidence. “Try to stop me.”
Cort was more than willing. He reached for his pistol, drew it and pointed it toward Jenna. But instead of shooting the weapon, he tossed it—or at least, that’s what it looked like. Jenna caught the weapon and turned it around on Cort. “I promised that I would give myself up when this was finished. I’ve changed my mind. So we can either do this together—on my terms—or we can do it at odds. The choice is yours.”
Cort rocked back and forth on his crutches for a moment. He was doing a decent job of hiding his surprise, and his fear. “What are these terms of yours...exactly?”
“First, back off. This is going to be a partnership. I’m working with you, not for you. Get that straight.”
Cort shrugged, refusing to agree, but Jenna kept going.
“Second, I want Mercy released, right now. Make a call, put her on a plane back to Key West or wherever she wants to go.”
This request got a response from Cort. His brows furrowed. “Who is Mercy?”
“What?” Jenna looked around for the woman, but she was nowhere to be seen. She turned to Noah, who looked as confused as Cort. The world, and the events that had brought her to the Very Large Array had changed. Not only was Mercy not present, but she was also not a part of her life, or Noah’s. It felt like a death. It stung. But she hid it. “She’s a clone. Like me. One of the first. We need to find her. She’ll help.”
Cort shrugged again, indifferent, but not opposed.
Jenna turned to Soter. “We’re going to need your help, too.”
Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) Page 31
