Safe (The Shielded Series Book 1)

by Christine DePetrillo

  “Gone? It can’t be gone, Dugan. Hovercopters don’t just disappear. Certainly not one a simple cop has access to. And I don’t think Emerge Tech would have access to cloaked crafts.”

  Mikale thought about his collection of vehicles in the garage adjacent to their warehouse base. He loved anything that rolled on the ground, flew through the air, or swam through the water. He knew how to drive them all too. If he didn’t have invisible vehicles, no one else did.

  “I don’t know. The copter was there one moment, then poof. The next moment it was nowhere. Maybe they flew into the security field and got fried.”

  Mikale shook his head though Dugan couldn’t see him. “No. Even if the cop didn’t know about the security field, Ashby would. He’s lived within Emerge Techs walls long enough to know it’s protected by more than the physical walls.”

  “Maybe the cop knew another way in and out. We have our ways so the cops probably have theirs.”

  That was possible, but in a hovercopter? Mikale got his team in and out on the ground. Having worked inside Emerge Tech’s walls, he knew how it ran and what its weaknesses were. It also helped that one of his projects as an Emerge Tech employee had been working on those walls. All Mikale had to do was memorize the code for one of the panels and it was as if he had his own key.

  As Dugan had said, though, that was an on-the-ground way in. Less liable to be spotted on the ground than taking an airborne route. It would also take some pretty sophisticated flying to get through a single dead panel in the security field above the walls, assuming someone else had been able to hack the code.

  “So we have no idea where Ashby and his bodyguard are?” Mikale clenched his teeth.

  “Not at this time, sir, but we’re optimistic.”

  “Glad someone is.”

  “We’ll find them.”

  “If you don’t…” He let that thought go unfinished, knowing Dugan could fill in the blank for himself.

  Mikale ended the call and removed his earpiece, tossing it to the desktop in disgust. Rubbing his forehead, he tapped his tablet and opened a picture of his mother. Laurette Warres had been a formidable woman, raising Mikale on her own. When she’d fallen ill, all his brilliance did him no good in trying to save her. He regretted what he’d had to do instead.

  He could build impressive prosthetic limbs with Ashby, but stopping his mother’s body from withering away was beyond his grasp. She’d given him everything, and he couldn’t give her a simple thing like life.

  Doesn’t seem fair.

  He was working on justice though. Justice for her death. Justice for getting kicked out of Emerge Tech. Justice for Ashby’s attempt to stop his plague from doing what it was designed to do. The planet needed a cleansing and who was Ashby to stop that?

  Mikale stood and looked out the window again. “You can’t hide forever, Foster.”

  ****

  The hovercopter hummed along as Foster’s thoughts bounced around his skull. Over the last few hours, he’d done about a thousand things wrong. He’d almost gotten caught on the city streets by Mikale’s associates while obtaining samples from bodies afflicted with the disease. He’d divulged his secret of being a GEC to someone he’d just met. He’d mixed medicine and administered it to a patient he hadn’t checked physically or given an official diagnosis. He let two other strangers in on his GEC secret. He’d agreed to let his new acquaintances into his Vermont sanctuary. He was about to put the lives of the others who lived in Vermont in danger.

  And he couldn’t forget his growing attraction to his bodyguard. An attraction he should be pushing right out of his mind. Immediately.

  He glanced at Darina without moving his head, hoping to be discrete. She was looking out the side window of the hovercopter, her right knee pushed into the back of the pilot’s seat so her leg dangled. Her right boot wiggled.

  Is she as nervous as I am?

  Probably not. Officer Darina Lazitter didn’t strike him as the type to get nervous over anything.

  Except her son.

  Foster regarded the back of Zeke’s head. What had prompted Darina to take in a GEC? Especially one who had seizures. He knew firsthand how difficult it was to live with someone with that condition, never mind keep a GEC hidden. Foster had been genetically engineered at six years old. He’d escaped from the company that had created him and survived on the streets for two years, alone until the woman he considered his mother, Carielle Ashby, had taken him in.

  He’d just had a violent seizure and was sleeping under a highway overpass when Carielle drove by in her land cruiser. The first image he had upon waking was of massive spiked tires.

  “You look like shit, kid,” she’d said when she hopped down from the driver’s seat.

  He hadn’t said anything. He’d learned a while back that the less he talked to people the safer he was. As tough as life on the streets had been, the alternative—getting hacked to pieces by the company that made him—was far less attractive.

  “You hungry?” she’d asked.

  Of course he was. Ravenous.

  She’d held out her hand. “The streets are no place for a kid, even one like you. I can give you food and shelter and a place to grow up to be something, but you have to work at it. I don’t give something for nothing, got it?”

  For some reason, Foster had taken her hand and let her pull him to his feet. He was still dizzy from his seizure so he stumbled into her. She caught him easily and held him for a moment. It had been the first hug he’d ever received.

  It wasn’t the last.

  Carielle had stuck to her word. She’d cared for him along with several other GECs, kept their secrets, and made sure they all got proper schooling. When she’d gone off to fight after the world went black, Foster had an unshakable feeling she wouldn’t be coming back. She’d been the type to give her all for the cause.

  When he and the other GECs who had come to know her as their mother learned of her death, he’d felt both sadness and pride. She’d made a difference in his life and in the world. He’d never forget her.

  That was why he’d built his Vermont sanctuary—the sanctuary he was about to expose to people he wasn’t entirely sure he should trust yet.

  Send me a sign, Mom. Not that he believed in signs. Signs weren’t scientific.

  “Relax.” Darina’s voice made Foster jump.

  He angled to face her, willing himself to at least appear relaxed. “What makes you think I’m not relaxed?”

  She laughed, her face turning into something truly artistic. “Instinct makes me think you’re not relaxed, Doc.” She slid her right leg down and turned to lean against the hovercopter’s door so she faced him. “I can say you can trust us,” she waved her right hand out to encompass herself, Ghared, and Zeke, “but you’re not going to trust us until we show you why you can.”

  “You kept Mikale’s men from grabbing me. You got me out of a burning building and out of Emerge Tech,” Foster said. “You’ve probably already shown me.”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “Sometimes people take a little more convincing.”

  “Well, I believed you were motivated to protect me because Emerge Tech was giving you a hefty paycheck to do so.” He looked out the window for a moment then turned back to her. “But now… who knows what is going on back there? Mikale might decide to demolish Emerge Tech altogether. He has his reasons for wanting the company to go down in a fiery blaze.”

  “I read somewhere they fired him for stealing. Is that true?”

  “Yes, but he was in a situation. His mother was ill, and Emerge Tech wouldn’t let Mikale bring her inside their walls so he could care for her. He stole supplies to take to her. When he got caught, he was fired immediately.”

  “What’s the status of his mother?”

  “I heard she was dead.”

  “You and Warres were partners at Emerge Tech?”

  Why did he suddenly feel as if he were in an official interrogation?

  “Yes.”

&nb
sp; “And after he got fired…”

  “We didn’t speak anymore.”

  “Some friend.” She gave him a disgusted look.

  “Maybe there’s more to it than you think, Officer Judgmental.”

  Her lips turned up, and he forgot to be pissed at her assumptions. “We have some time to kill. Tell me the story.”

  Foster settled into his seat and raked his hand through his hair. He needed a shower and a drink. Maybe the drink should come first. He traced the outline of his tablet in his pocket and waffled over the right way to begin the tale.

  “Mikale got fired. Emerge Tech has a policy that as soon as you are no longer an employee, you must leave the premises immediately. They actually have security escort you out. A team boxes up your personal shit and sends it to you. You can’t have any interaction with any colleagues, friends, no one as you leave.

  “I watched Mikale walk by our lab. I stepped out and called his name, but the security guards shook their heads and kept walking, ushering him along. Mikale looked back once, and I figured that was his way of telling me we’d catch up later.”

  Foster cleared his throat, the memory of his best friend and partner being shoved out like a criminal upsetting him all over again. True, he shouldn’t have been stealing supplies, but times were tough and his mother was seriously ill. The company could have been more sympathetic, especially considering the excellent work Mikale Warres had done for them.

  “After I finished working for the day,” Foster continued, “my plan was to head over to Mikale’s domicile which was right next to mine. I wasn’t thinking he’d be kicked out of there too. Only Emerge Tech employees get to live inside the walls.

  “At the last minute, I got pulled into an emergency meeting regarding the blackout. We were working on getting power back to the rest of the globe and were close to figuring it out—Mikale and I in particular.” He looked at Darina here. “I’m not bragging.”

  “I didn’t say you were.” She motioned for him to continue.

  “The meeting lasted hours, and by the time I got to my domicile, Mikale’s was totally empty. I mean, cleaned out. No trace that he’d ever lived there.” Foster felt as if he were reliving that terrible day all over again as he told the story. Not his favorite day. “When I got to my domicile, a handwritten note was stuck to the door.”

  “What did it say?” Darina leaned closer, either to hear him better or because she was interested in the story. Her eyes were so focused on him he felt a little like a specimen under a high-powered microscope.

  “It said, Find me.”

  “But you didn’t find him?” Her voice had a note of accusation in it. She didn’t know. She wasn’t there.

  “No, I didn’t. I couldn’t.”

  “Why? Didn’t you know where to find him? If you guys were such buddies, wouldn’t you know where to look for him on the outside?”

  “Am I on trial or something here, Officer Lazitter?” He folded his arms across his chest.

  A slow grin curved her lips, and any hope he had of getting angry with her sifted into the seat beneath him. How many men had she reduced to mere ash with those lips?

  “Not on trial.” She shifted in her seat, threw a glance to Zeke in the front, then focused back on him. “I’m just trying to understand what went down.”

  “Trying to decide whether I’m worth protecting or not.”

  She gave a little shrug. “Maybe.”

  He supposed that was fair. “I did know where to look for him, but Emerge Tech wouldn’t let me go. They gave me two choices. Look for Mikale and suffer his same fate or don’t look for him and continue to work on solving the biggest problem the globe had ever faced. Would you have chosen differently than I did?”

  Darina shook her head. “The world needed you more than Warres did.”

  “That’s what I thought. Originally.” He rubbed his forehead. “But if I’d gone looking for him, maybe he wouldn’t have unleashed his disease while the globe was trying to get back on track from the Anarch assault. Maybe I could have reasoned with him. Maybe I could have gotten him back into Emerge Tech to work on getting everything back online again.”

  “Maybe, maybe, maybe,” Darina said. “Can’t play the What If game, Doc. If we do that, we’ll have to go all the way back to what if the cops had caught the Anarch before they unplugged us all.” She blew out a breath and drummed her fingers on her knee.

  “Wait a minute.” Foster leaned toward her now, the small space between their seats growing smaller. “The cops knew about the Anarch?”

  “They had tried to shut the world down more than once, but they were a tricky bunch to track down. Amazingly we were only able to find them after they zapped all our tech.”

  “Old-fashioned methods sometimes work the best.”

  “Simplicity is often the most valuable tool.”

  “If you two are done trading philosophical quotes,” Ghared interrupted, “I believe we’ve just crossed the Vermont border. Now what, Ashby?”

  Foster peered out his window at the treetops below. While Boston and most cities had fried with the blackout, the fighting, and Mikale’s plague, the woods of Vermont had remained miraculously immune. Most of the people who lived in Vermont had moved to the woods to get away from the bustle of crowded city life. They lived simply off the land and didn’t give a shit about the latest technology. With acres and acres of land—mostly filled with trees—between properties, the plague hadn’t spread as quickly either.

  Vermont was the perfect safe haven.

  And I’m bringing these three into it. Foster hoped he wasn’t making a colossal mistake.

  ****

  Darina couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen so much green in one place. Probably not since she was a little girl and her parents owned a cottage in Maine on a gorgeous lake. They’d spent summers there. She, Deo, and Dixon were wild children, running free—and often barefoot—through the grass, playing hide-and-seek in the woods, swimming like fish in the refreshing waters of the lake.

  That seems so long ago.

  She felt as if she’d lived a hundred lifetimes since those carefree days when she had her whole family together and survival wasn’t her main goal. Back then, she and her brothers had been invincible. Now every day brought more challenges to her existence such as what they were going to eat next, staying plague-free, catching the next person to go crazy on the streets, protecting genius doctors from people that wanted to kill them. Deo and Dixon had been cheated out of their futures too. Shit, she missed them.

  Zeke turned around and gave her a smile.

  At least I have him. And Ghared. She had people. She wasn’t totally alone. Sometimes, however, when she stared at the cracked ceiling in her tiny bedroom at night, she felt alone and burdened.

  And furious.

  She hated what her life had become. She hated that Zeke had to live in the world that now existed. She hated that she didn’t have time to do anything else but hunt down bad guys or, as in the case right now, protect what appeared to be the good guy. She hated that there wasn’t anything else to do anyway. She hated that everything had depended so heavily on technology that one flick of the proverbial switch had upended the entire globe. She hated that people were dying because some crazy chemist had a warped mission of cleansing and restarting the human population.

  She hated that sometimes she thought his mission wasn’t a bad idea.

  “Can you get us lower?” Foster asked, leaning toward Ghared. “I’ll be able to pick out my property if we’re a little closer to the ground.”

  She looked out the window again. Every once and a while, a break in the treetops indicated cleared land. Off to the east, mountains pointed up at the hovercopter, and Darina had an urge to climb to the top of one and scream her lungs out. Maybe then she’d be rid of the perpetual frustration swirling inside her.

  “Descending,” Ghared said. “Zeke, what do you have on radar? Anyone following us?”

  Darina smile
d. Though Ghared wasn’t a cop, he thought like one. Actually, he thought like a soldier—and a tech geek—and that was even better sometimes. She was glad to have him as backup on this assignment that had become much more than an easy paycheck.

  She probably should have let Emerge Tech take care of its own people. The huge company had been under fire for erecting its walls and seemingly shutting out the outside world, but Darina knew its employees were working on solutions. They couldn’t do that if the plague reached them. They couldn’t do that if they didn’t have labs to work in. They couldn’t do that on broken down city streets. She was probably one of the few people who got it. That didn’t mean she liked it. The idea of rich bastards and bitches living the high life while she and the rest of the regular folk lived like homeless wretches didn’t sit well in her stomach.

  But if they can bring change for the better…

  If they could do that, they’d be an answer to a prayer.

  “No one is following us,” Zeke reported, a note of confidence in his voice. Flying with Ghared always made him happy. The kid was good at it too.

  “There.” Foster shot his arm into the front between Ghared and Zeke’s seats. “To the northwest. See that open patch and the lake?”

  “Got it. Can I land in the open patch?” Ghared asked.

  “Yes.”

  Darina pushed closer to her window. She squinted at parallel lines etched into multiple fields adjacent to the open patch. “Are those… are those rows of crops?” She turned back to Foster to see him smiling.

  He waved his hands, wiggling his fingers. “Be prepared to be shocked and amazed, Officer Lazitter.”

  I’m already aroused. Why shouldn’t she add shocked and amazed to the list? What other long forgotten emotions could Dr. Foster Ashby bring to the surface in her?

  Ghared lowered the hovercopter in the open patch and guided Zeke through post-flight checks while Darina climbed out from the back. Foster met her on her side of the craft as he stuffed his tablet into his pocket and zipped it closed.

  Grabbing her arm, he stopped her from taking a step toward the fields. “I think we need a little group meeting before I let you all loose here.”