“You are fine where you are,” Jabala said. She wasn’t as fond of the dog as her sister was, but while Kusum was away, Jeeval had become her responsibility.
“Well?” Naresh asked. He had been the one who’d figured out how to work the shortwave radio, and had taken to broadcasting a few times a day the number of the satellite phone Sanjay had found in a building the next town over.
“The man said the same thing Sanjay told us, that the UN is not the UN,” she said.
“Sanjay did not tell us that. He said maybe not.”
“Well, the man on the phone did not say maybe, so I think Sanjay’s instincts were correct.”
“Based on a conversation with someone you have never met,” Naresh pointed out.
“I feel that he spoke the truth. You do not believe him?”
“I could not hear what he said, but if this is what he told you…” Naresh paused, and shrugged. “I believe him, too.”
“Then why did you fight me?”
“I did not fight you. I merely pointed out something that needed to be taken into consideration.”
Grunting in annoyance, Jabala looked away.
While she had been concerned when Kusum, Sanjay, and the others had left, she was extremely worried now. What if they ran into trouble with these people claiming to be with the UN? What if they needed help?
What if they needed help right now?
Ap, ap, ap, Jeeval barked, pawing at Jabala’s leg.
“Jeeval, not now!”
She pushed the dog away harder than she meant to, sending Jeeval tumbling backward into Naresh’s chair. Jeeval yelped as she scrambled back to her feet.
Jabala immediately knelt down and stroked the dog’s head. “I am sorry. Are you okay?”
A whimper, followed by ap, ap.
She picked up the dog. “Good dog,” she said. With her free hand, she picked up the satellite phone and looked at Naresh. “How does this work?”
“A signal comes down, and—”
“No. That is not what I meant. Does this have to stay in one place, or can it move around like a mobile phone?”
“Of course it can move around. Do you see any wires?”
“Why are you being difficult? Does it have other equipment that needs to travel with it, or is this it?”
“What other equipment would it need?”
She bit back her frustration. “I will assume that the answer is no.”
“Well, it does have a charger,” he said. “The battery does not last forever.”
“And where is that?”
13
SHERIDAN, WYOMING
8:33 AM MST
“MY DAD WAS right,” Rick said, his eyes narrowed to slits. “All you want to do is take what’s ours.”
The teenager was sitting on the bed of the motel room he and Ginny had been put in after the previous evening’s events. Matt was surprised they hadn’t tried to get away. Of course, if they had, they would have found one of Matt’s men stationed outside.
“All we want to do,” Matt said, “is get out of town. But the only way that’s going to happen is if we clear the roads.”
“So you’re going to just take one of our snowplows.” It was amazing how little the kid’s lips moved as he spoke.
“Two of your plows,” Matt corrected him. “And one of your cargo trucks to haul gas in.”
Rick’s uninjured hand unconsciously rolled into a fist. “They don’t belong to you.”
“That’s why I’m asking.”
“And if I say no?”
“That would be disappointing.”
“You’ll still take them, won’t you?”
Matt stared at him, his expression neutral. “Rick, do you realize what’s going on?”
“I know you’re going to steal our stuff.”
“I mean, the bigger picture?”
Rick glared at Matt for a moment before looking over at his cousin by the window.
“I asked a question,” Matt said.
“Lot of crazy things going on.”
“That’s one way to put it.” Matt adjusted his position on the end of the bed. “The human race is dying. There’s not a lot of people left. If we’re all going to survive, we’re going to need to work together. So, yes, we will take those vehicles, but they will still technically be yours because the two of you are coming with us.”
“Like hell we are,” Rick said.
Matt leaned back. “So you’d rather stay here? What happens when you run out of food? Or don’t have anything left to burn to stay warm? Maybe you make it through this winter, but what about the next? Any prepackaged food you’ll find will have gone bad by then. You’ll have to spend your entire summer growing food for when things get cold again. Do you know how to farm? Do you know how to store food so it will last the winter? Do you really want to bet your cousin’s life on that?”
“We can take care of ourselves!”
“Can you?” Matt looked down at Rick’s bandaged hand. “You’re lucky we have medical personnel with us to take care of that. What happens when you’re out in the field, using a piece of equipment you’ve never used before, and you slice open your leg? Or what if you get sick? I’m not talking Sage Flu. Out here, by yourself, pretty much anything could kill you.”
Silence.
“Rick,” Ginny said. “I think we should go with them.”
“Shut up,” Rick told her.
“I don’t want to die,” she went on. “He’s right. We will if we stay.”
“I said, be quiet!”
She took a couple steps toward the bed. “What if no one else comes by? This might be our only chance to get away.”
“We’ll be fine on our own!”
Ginny bit her lip, clearly not agreeing with him, but Matt could see the will to argue with her cousin—someone she’d been putting all her faith in up to this point—draining away.
“You won’t be fine,” Matt said. “Ginny knows it, and you do, too.” He stood up. “But I’ll tell you what. If you want to stay, you can stay.”
“What about our vehicles?” Rick asked.
“Two plows, one cargo truck go with us. But we’ll pay for them.”
“With what?” Mick scoffed.
“I’ll leave you a high-powered field radio. Maybe someday you’ll want to try to reach someone.”
“Doesn’t seem like a very fair trade.”
“You’re right. It isn’t. I could probably find a dozen plows within a mile of here, and twice as many cargo trucks. A good, working radio? That’s what’s hard to find. It’s worth more than all your vehicles combined.”
Though a sneer was still on Rick’s face, there was also uncertainty in his eyes.
Matt held out his hand. “So, do we have a deal?”
“For something you’d take anyway?”
“I’d rather do it this way, man to man.”
Rick looked at the proffered hand, and finally took it. “All right. It’s a deal.”
“Good.” As Matt released his grip, he turned to Ginny. “If you have anything you want to bring along, you should go get it now. We’ll be leaving soon.”
“Whoa!” Rick said, jumping up. “Ginny’s staying with me.”
“You think so?” Matt asked. “Ginny?”
She looked from her cousin to Matt and back. “We’ll die if we stay here,” she said, her voice not much more than a whisper. “Rick, please.”
“We’ve done fine so far,” Rick said.
“For a week,” Matt pointed out.
“We have to go with them,” Ginny said.
Rick stood motionless for a moment. “Okay,” he finally said. “That’s fine. Go with them. I’m staying.”
“What?” Ginny said. “No!”
“You want to go, you go. But I am staying.” He turned to Matt. “When do I get my radio?”
__________
BRANDON WAS MISSING yet again. They’d been packing up their things in their room when he said he had to c
heck on something, and left. Josie ended up having to load not only her and her father’s bags, but her brother’s, too, into their Humvee.
When she returned to the room and he was still not there, that was it. Enough.
“Brandon!” she yelled as she stepped back out onto the walkway. “Brandon, where are you?’
Around her, the others moved in and out of the rooms as they prepared to leave. She asked a few if they had seen her brother, but no one had. She was about to start a room-by-room search when Brandon came out of the door to the motel office. In his arms was a blanket that appeared to be full of something.
She marched toward him. “What have you been doing? It’s almost time to—” She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at him. “What happened?”
Across the right side of his jaw were two thin lines of blood. Scratches.
“What?” he asked.
She pointed at his face. “That.”
He touched the wounds and looked at the blood on his fingertips. “Oh, uh, yeah. Nothing.”
“Nothing? That’s not nothing. Did you fall?”
“No. It’s nothing. I’m o—”
The blanket he was holding began to twist as if something were squirming inside.
Josie took a quick step backward. “What have you got in there?”
Looking defeated, Brandon said, “I couldn’t just leave him there.” He peeled a portion of the blanket back, and revealed the head of a tan, very scared-looking cat.
“Where did you find him?” Josie said, moving in for a closer look.
“Chloe and I found him yesterday when we searched the motel,” he said. “Please don’t tell Dad.”
“You think he’s not going to notice?”
“I mean, don’t tell him until after we get started. It’ll be too late then.”
Josie moved her hand cautiously over the cat’s head. Its eyes followed the movement, but when she began stroking the area between its ears, it seemed to relax some.
“Fine,” she said. “I won’t say anything. But if he gets mad, I don’t get in trouble for this.”
Brandon smiled. “No, of course not. It’s all my fault.”
She petted the cat a few more times. “Does it have a name?”
“I don’t know what it used to be called, but I was thinking Lucky would be good.”
She smiled. “No kidding.”
__________
WHILE THE SNOWPLOWS were checked out and the cargo truck loaded up with canisters of gas, Matt had one of his men take a spare radio into the room Rick was in and show the kid how to use it. When everything was set, the whole group gathered in the motel parking area.
“You can still come with us,” Matt said to Rick.
“I’m fine here,” the teen answered quickly, as if he’d been rehearsing the response for an hour.
Despite Rick’s words, Matt could tell the kid was terrified. “All right. You change your mind in the next four or five hours, give us a call on your radio, and we’ll send someone back to get you.”
Rick took a step back. “You’d better get going.”
“Rick, come with us,” Ginny said. “Please.”
Her cousin shook his head. “No reason for you to stay here any longer. Go on. Get out of here.”
He turned, walked back to his room, and shut the door.
Josie put an arm around Ginny. “Come on. You can ride with us.”
Tears rolling down her cheeks, the girl let herself be led away. Soon the only ones standing outside were Matt and Hiller, one of his men.
Matt pulled a zippered case out of his pocket and handed it to Hiller. “Hopefully you won’t have to wait long, but if it goes more than a couple of hours, use this.”
“Yes, sir.”
“There’s vaccine in there, too. For after,” Matt told him. “Be careful.”
As Hiller hurried off, Matt walked over to his Humvee and climbed into the front passenger seat. They had quite a convoy now. Ahead of him were the two plows, and behind, the rest of the troop transporters and the cargo truck.
He grabbed the radio mic and clicked the talk button. “Let’s move.”
__________
RICK PACED BACK and forth through the garage area of Thorton’s Equipment Rental Center. In one of the bays was a pickup truck that had been in mid-repair when everyone started dying, and in another, a tractor with a busted axle. Tools and oil jugs and parts were scattered everywhere, all reminders that Rick was alone now, and that the only one who could finish fixing any of the vehicles or could put everything away was him.
You screwed up big time, he told himself.
What the hell had he been thinking? Stay here? Alone? That was suicide. But even if the others had still been out front, pride and the words his father had said not long before dying would have prevented him from taking the offer.
“You’re in charge now,” his old man had told him. “You need to take care of things.”
He’d already messed that up, hadn’t he? Ginny was gone. She was family. He was supposed to take care of her. He wanted to be pissed off at her for defying him, but did he honestly think she would have been safer here with him?
No. Not even close.
He’d always thought being a grown-up would be so easy. No one to answer to. All the decisions his own. And yet here he was, with the freedom he’d been hoping for, and he just wanted to go back home, curl up under his covers, and stay there forever.
He wanted to be a kid again
He wanted things back to normal.
At some point he realized he’d been crying, but he couldn’t stop. Back and forth he paced, his mind in turmoil as the minutes turned to hours.
“All right, that’s enough. You’re making me dizzy, kid.”
Rick thought the words were only in his head until the man stepped out from behind the damaged tractor. Even as the man walked over to him, he couldn’t quite process what he was seeing. The man was alone, but…
“Hey!” Rick said, trying to jerk away as the man stuck a needle into his arm.
But the guy grabbed him with his other hand and held him in place. “Sorry about that. Was really hoping you’d decide to follow my friends on your own. Could have avoided this.”
“What?” Rick was suddenly dizzy, and while he heard the man’s words, he couldn’t quite understand their meaning.
“It’s all right. Here, let me help you down,” the man said.
Before Rick realized it, he was sitting on the concrete floor.
“What are you doing?” Rick asked, the words feeling heavy in his mouth.
The man had another needle in his hand and was moving it toward Rick’s arm.
“You don’t want to get sick, do you?”
The prick of the needle stung less than the one a moment before. Still, Rick wanted to brush it away. He tried to raise a hand, but apparently it was content to stay in his lap.
“Sorry for all this,” the man said. “But we couldn’t let you die out here.”
Rick closed his eyes and put a hand to his forehead as the world began to sway.
“Just relax,” the man told him. “Here.”
Rick was moving backward, slow and steady. When he opened his eyes again, he was staring up at the ceiling.
“Let it take you,” the man said.
Take me? Rick thought. Take me where?
“Close your eyes.”
As if acting on their own, his lids slid shut, and everything went black.
“Sleep.”
Once more, the power of suggestion worked its magic.
__________
HILLER CHOSE THE best of the last three remaining snowplows on the lot, loaded the kid into the passenger seat, and headed south. Between them was the portable radio Matt had never intended to leave behind.
When they reached the interstate, Hiller turned on the radio, checked to make sure it was set to the right frequency, and picked up the mic.
“Retrieval to M1,” he said. �
�Retrieval to M1.”
Matt’s voice jumped out of the speaker only seconds later. “This is M1. Go, Retrieval.”
“En route. Had to go active.”
“That’s too bad. Glad you’re on the way, though. Wait for you at checkpoint three.”
“Copy. Checkpoint three.”
__________
TWO HUNDRED MILES to the west, on board the Project Eden helicopter that was now flying in a parallel southward direction, the copilot, charged with monitoring radio transmissions, picked up the faintest of voices, hearing words like “is” and “route” and “bad” and “three.” The static was so bad, though, he couldn’t tell if it was one voice or two.
As he tried to fine-tune his reception, the transmission ceased. He hunted around, hoping to pick it up again, but there was nothing.
Since he had no idea what was being said, and no way of knowing which direction it came from, he decided not to disclose the information to Sims and the others. If he did, he was sure his boss would order them to search for the source, a task that would only succeed in keeping them through the storm.
Better to keep heading south. In a few more hours, they’d be in the relative warmth of New Mexico.
14
GORMAN, CALIFORNIA
9:47 AM PST
MARTINA KNEW IT was a bad idea before she tried it. But she also knew, if they were ever going to get on the road again, the first step would be to open her eyes.
Thankfully, she had had the sense to close the curtains before toppling into bed after their New Year’s Eve celebration. If not, she’d have been permanently blinded by the sunlight.
Dear God, her head hurt.
How much had she had to drink? Three glasses of champagne? Or was it four? Could her head hurt that much from only four glasses? She had no idea. She hardly ever drank, and quite possibly never would again.
Maybe it had been more than four. She had a fuzzy memory of someone—Noreen, she thought—suggesting they walk back to the liquor store for another bottle when they ran out, but she had no recollection of actually doing so.
What was it her college roommate Crissy told her? “For every glass of alcohol, drink a glass of water. That’s the secret.”
Eden Rising Page 12
