“Mr. Anthony,” said Derek, “thank you for agreeing to do the interview. I only have a few questions. I ask you answer them honestly.”
“Who did you say you were with?” asked another voice Danny presumed was Clint Anthony.
“A private research and technology company,” said Derek. “We sponsored some of the psychological testing you underwent in exchange for a reduced sentence.”
“Okay then,” said Anthony. “Ask your questions.”
“Have you been suffering from any headaches?”
“No more than usual.”
“What do you mean?” asked Derek. “Elaborate.”
“I don’t know,” said Anthony. “I’ve had headaches on and off my whole life. Nothing unusual. I guess maybe I have had a few more since I’ve been locked up.”
“How frequent are they?”
“A couple a week.”
“Are they intense?”
“They can be if I don’t get down to the infirmary and get some meds. If I get one in the middle of the night, don’t catch it quick enough, then it can get bad.”
“What about your sleep patterns? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you suffering from any exhaustion? Muscle fatigue?”
Anthony laughed. “Seriously? I’m in jail. I don’t get good sleep. Nobody gets good sleep.”
“Let me rephrase that,” said Derek. “Are you getting less sleep now than before you did the study with us?”
There was a rustling on the tape, then the sound of metal scraping against concrete. Derek cleared his throat.
“I don’t think so,” said Anthony. “Should I be? Getting less sleep, I mean? What did you do in that study? I don’t remember taking any drugs.”
“No, no, no,” Derek said, chuckling nervously. “We didn’t administer any pharmaceuticals. But yes, it’s possible you’d be suffering from mild insomnia.”
“Yeah,” said Anthony, “that’s not happening. I’m fine.”
“Good.”
“There is something, though…” Anthony’s voice was softer but somehow louder, as if he’d lowered it but moved closer to the microphone. “I’ve had really vivid nightmares.”
There was silence for a moment. Derek cleared his throat again. “Nightmares?”
“Yeah, like I’m tripping. Like weed and molly and whatever all mixed together. It’s that kind of vivid, you know?”
“Tell me about it.”
“The dreams are all different. But it’s like the end of the world or something. Like the sky is red or black. The Earth is gray and covered in ash. Or it’s on fire.”
Danny paused the recording and thought about what he’d just heard. He looked over at his dog, who was licking herself on the circular rug at the center of the apartment. Then he touched his neck. He touched his side and felt an ache swell there. It became a jabbing pain, throbbing for a moment before dissipating and leaving his body completely.
His mouth went dry and Danny got up from the bed, crossing the few feet to the kitchen. He pulled a plastic pitcher from the near-empty refrigerator and poured himself a glass of cold water. He guzzled it, trickles of it leaking down his cheeks.
He poured a second glass. Then a third. He was thirsty.
He stood there, leaning against the refrigerator, thinking about the questions Derek had asked him. He wondered what else was on that recorder. Who else had Derek interviewed, and why?
Danny put the glass in the sink then slunk back to his bed. He propped a couple of sagging feather pillows behind his bed, folding them over for support, and pressed play on the recorder.
“You ever read those books about this dude named Marcus Battle?” Clint Anthony asked Derek.
“No.”
“Me neither. But I got a cellmate who did. He read all of the books about this guy who lived in Texas after the end of the world. The guy was some ex-military badass who went crazy and killed a bunch of people out of revenge or whatever. Then there’s some girl who’s like some knife master. She kills people too. A lot of killing. But they’re conflicted about it. It’s not killing for the sake of it, it’s killing to survive. Anyhow, I don’t know the whole thing, but I kinda feel like I’m Marcus Battle in these dreams. Like I’m in a wasteland and I’m fighting to survive.”
Danny had heard enough. He stopped the playback and wiped the thin veil of sweat blooming on his forehead. He was hot. Suddenly it was hot in his apartment. He pushed himself from the bed again, against the complaint of the worn mattress springs, and found the thermostat. He didn’t have a fancy app on his phone to remotely regulate the temperature; he had to do it old school. He ran his finger across the panel, entered a code, and chose sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, lowering the target five degrees.
The HVAC system clunked, and a renewed burst of air whooshed through the vent on the wall above his head. He stood there for a moment letting the chill evaporate the sweat before he moved back to the bed.
The television was muted, but images of the flooding filled the screen. Danny tapped the advance button on the digital recorder, randomly choosing track four. It didn’t matter, he figured.
The clip began and Derek cleared his throat. “This is a question and answer session with study participant Gilda Luster. The time right now is nine thirty in the morning, Pacific Standard Time, Friday, October 17, 2025.”
Gilda Luster? Gilda. Gilda. That name rang a bell. He couldn’t place it though. Maybe he’d seen it on a ticket at the diner. It was an unusual name, antique even.
“Gilda,” said Derek, “have you been experiencing any episodes of déjà vu?”
When Gilda spoke, her cadence sounded almost military. It was disciplined and slightly masculine.
“Yes. By that, you mean the sensation I’ve experienced something before?”
“Yes.”
“I have. Two or three times per week.”
Danny pictured Gilda with ice blue eyes, eyes that could see through him. He saw her with long hair pulled back tight against her head into a ponytail. She was broad-shouldered and somewhere between athletic and sinewy.
“Tell me about that,” said Derek. “Give me some examples.”
“Well, most recently, I was at the beach. There were crowds there. It was an unusually warm day for October. I remember sweating.”
Danny wiped his forehead again with the back of his hand. He picked at his T-shirt. The air was cooler in the apartment but not cool enough.
“The traffic on PCH was bumper to bumper. Cars were honking, their drivers yelling at each other. It wasn’t the relaxing day I had planned. I walked down to the surf, letting my feet sink into the sand as the waves washed in and out. The sand was cold. The water was cold. There were storm clouds on the horizon. I think they were storm clouds. They were dark. They seemed pregnant with rain.”
“That’s a unique description,” said Derek. “Pregnant.”
“I guess.”
Danny imagined her narrowing those penetrating eyes and shrugging her muscular shoulders.
“Please proceed,” Derek urged.
“The whole scene was somehow familiar. The clouds on the horizon, the crowds on the beach, the stalled traffic on the freeway, the heat. I couldn’t place it, but I sensed I’d seen it all before.”
There was the sound of scribbling on paper and the clink of liquid spilling over ice cubes in a glass. Danny moved the recorder closer to his ear. Maggie was asleep now on the rug, her back legs kicking as she dreamed. She whimpered, her lips flapping over her teeth.
“Any other examples?” asked Derek. “Any other times you experienced such a strong sensation?”
“Yes,” said Gilda. “A couple of months ago I was in the garden.”
“You like to garden?”
“I have to garden. You remember I’m part of a group that is preparing.”
“I remember,” said Derek. “You’re preppers, people who are stockpiling goods and supplies for the apocalypse.”
“I don’t prefer that term, preppe
r, but yes. We all know it’s only a matter of time before mankind tries to destroy itself. We’re planning for that inevitability.”
“You’re talking about the OASIS,” said Derek. “A bunker you’ve built underneath the Getty Mansion.”
“The Getty Villa,” she corrected. “I think the mansion is in your neck of the woods, San Francisco.”
“Yes, you’re right. Sorry. But the OASIS is a self-sustaining bunker for your group, right?”
“Not just my group. The plan is to welcome whoever we think might be helpful to our efforts when the time comes. We know not every member will make it to the bunker when it all goes to hell. We’ll search for survivors and recruit the ones we need.”
“Into the OASIS.”
“Yes.”
“And what’s it stand for?”
“Order of Apocalyptic Survivors In Sync.”
“Clever.”
“Aren’t we getting away from the point?” asked Gilda.
“Sorry again,” said Derek. “But you do you know your involvement is precisely because of the OASIS, right? I think I disclosed that before our first session, before you agreed to take part in the study.”
“I’m aware.”
“Tell me about the second déjà vu, the one in the garden.”
Danny stopped the playback. He didn’t care about another déjà vu. These were the same questions Derek had asked him. There was a pattern there, symptoms of something. Side effects? And the whole idea that there was some underground facility beneath the cliffside Getty Villa sounded ludicrous. It was science fiction.
But wasn’t all of it science fiction? The clandestine interrogations, the weblike connections amongst a plane crash and a flood, a jail inmate and a so-called prepper? And somehow he was mixed up in all of it? How could that even be possible?
He’d never agreed to a study. He didn’t even like Derek or have a clear handle on what exactly it was the dude did for a living. He’d thought he knew. He didn’t. He wondered if his ex really knew.
The thought of his ex sent a sharp pain between his shoulder blades. He took a deep breath and exhaled. He thought about Gilda. Gilda Luster. Gilda. Luster…
He hopped up from the bed. Opposite the foot of it, on a rectangular writing desk pushed as far into a corner as he could fit it, was his laptop. It was refurbished. It was slow, another thrift-shop find. He’d bought it at Venice Beach from a shopkeeper who went by the name Filter. The guy was an ex-con with a drug habit, but he was good at fixing up junk. He’d wanted seventy-five bucks for the computer. Danny had paid him fifty.
He sat on the cheap plastic swivel chair at the desk and tapped the computer’s space bar. The display came to life and Danny entered his passcode. He waited for the operating system to cycle and boot up. It did, eventually. He clicked the icon for his web browser. The bar at the top of the screen slowly appeared with the invitation to enter a keyword into a search engine. He did, then typed Gilda’s name and the word OASIS.
His Internet connection was ridiculously slow because he was logged into the open network of someone else in his building. While the old plaster walls of the apartment house didn’t do well for wireless signals, the Internet was free this way, so Danny lived with it. He didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t afford it otherwise. The only reason he had a working television was because basic cable was included in the rent.
The engine stopped spinning and displayed the results. The top of the list was populated with references to cosmetics. The farther down the list of sites he scrolled, however, he found a couple of references to Gilda Luster. There weren’t any connections to anything called the OASIS.
One of the references was a people finder website that didn’t offer anything of value. The other was a link to an article in a preparedness magazine called Off The Grid.
Danny skimmed through it, looking for the mention of Gilda. He gave up, hit CTRL+F, and typed in her name. It highlighted several references, including the caption of a photograph of Gilda working in her garden. It was more a greenhouse with elevated tables and complex hydroponic systems, but that wasn’t what caught Danny’s eyes. What fixed his attention was Gilda.
She stood behind the tables in a tank top. Her broad shoulders, tanned and muscular, carried a thin, fit physique. Her white blonde hair was pulled back tight against her head into a ponytail. And glaring into the camera, contradicting the broad smile on her face, were intense ice blue eyes that radiated concern, authority, and a hint of paranoia.
Danny wasn’t sure how much of his own thoughts and fears he was projecting onto her. It didn’t matter. She looked exactly as he’d imagined her. He knew he’d never met her. As he stared at the full-color image on his crappy laptop display, he was confident he’d never seen her in person before. Yet she was familiar. He could almost smell the loamy soil under her fingernails and the dried sweat behind her ear at the nape of her neck where the ponytail began.
He closed the computer and slid out of the chair. He was sweating again. This wasn’t science fiction, it was his truth. Somehow, he was embroiled in some weird mind-altering experiment, if that was what it was. He didn’t know what it was. He only knew he was experiencing side effects similar to two people he’d never met, one of whom he recognized down to the sharp gaze of her eyes.
He’d always disliked Derek for tangible reasons. Now there was something less so. The gazillionaire jerk had done something to him he couldn’t quite figure out. And as much as he wanted to confront him and grill him with a litany of questions, he also wanted nothing to do with any of it.
He stepped back to the bed, dazed. He was aware enough to step over the dog before hopping back amongst the dune of sheets piled to one side of the bed. He picked up the recorder and rubbed his thumb along the smooth plastic casing.
His life was tough enough, lonely enough, on-the-edge enough that anything that tipped the scales the wrong way would send him spiraling out of control. It was better to attempt to ignore it, smarter to pretend it was fiction.
Danny stared at the recorder. He considered clicking through the clips and randomly starting another then decided against it. He held the power button until the LCD display went blank. He dropped it onto the bed, amongst the tangle of sheets, and lay back, staring at the ceiling fan.
He focused on the chain flapping, dancing, to the rhythm of the revolving blades. The blades were spinning, a warbling disc above him. He picked one of the blades and tried to isolate it as it moved around and around and around.
He yawned. It was late. Or early. Whatever it was, he’d had enough. He didn’t want to think about anything. He wanted to sleep and to dream happy dreams. He drifted off with the image of Maggie in his mind, her feet kicking in short spasms.
He should be so happy.
CHAPTER 16
April 5, 2026
New Orleans, Louisiana
The tightness in Bob Monk’s chest worried him, but he couldn’t say anything. His arm tingled, and he was clammy. At least he thought he was clammy. It was hard to tell in the damp chill on the roof of his daughters’ rented house.
He flexed his fingers in and out, rolling his shoulder in circles.
“You okay?” asked Kristin. “You don’t look okay.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Just uncomfortable. We’ve been up here forever.”
The four of them were huddled near the roof’s peak. There were four or five feet between them and the waterline. The rain had stopped, and the subsequent mist was dissipating. But they were stuck in the chilled air, wet and exhausted. And the water was still rising.
“Mom?” asked Katie.
“Yes?”
“Why were you a waitress?”
Bob knew his children did this when they were frightened. They’d always done it. When his mother had died from Alzheimer’s and they were on their way to the burial, the girls were talking about Chevy versus Ford. They’d pressed him on the differences and why one was better than the other. He’d always been a Che
vy man. Always. He’d considered at the time, as the ninety-five-dollar-per-hour limousine carried them on gliding wheels toward the aboveground plot, that they were trying to take his mind off the day’s melancholy.
They weren’t one of those New Orleans families who celebrated life with colorful parades or carried the casket on their shoulders triumphantly from block to block. They were grief-stricken. Despite the length of Bob’s mother’s illness, they’d been floored by the loss of the family matriarch.
He’d decided then, in the darkness of the air-cooled backseats, that they were trying to take their own minds off the pain. They’d been too young to really empathize enough and think of him and how he felt. But now, as they huddled together on the roof, he reconsidered the notion. They were intuitive girls. They were kind, if not spoiled and a little jealous of their baby sister having flown the coop. They were trying to take his and his wife’s minds off the danger that crept toward them. The girls could swim, after all. Bob and Kristin could not.
Still, asking about Kristin’s job as a waitress was a seemingly random question that had come from nowhere. She hadn’t been a waitress for more than a year now, and there had never been a discussion about why she’d waited tables for twenty-two years. She’d just done it, pure and simple. Maybe Katie was bored and couldn’t think of anything else to ask.
“We needed the money,” Kristin said flatly. “Raising a family isn’t cheap. Never has been.”
“But Dad makes good money,” said Kiki. “He supported us.”
Kristin wrapped her arm inside her husband’s and held him closer to her. They were both shivering. “He does make good money. Your dad works hard, always, and he’s a good provider. But everything is expensive. We had three girls and a two-bedroom house. An auto mechanic can only make so much, no matter how many transmissions he rebuilds.”
“I should have gone out on my own,” said Bob. A wave of nausea crept up from his gut. He winced, trying to keep it from his wife. “Your mom always told me I could make a go of it. But the money was steady. I could fix cars, which I love, and not worry about the business end of things.”
The Alt Apocalypse {Book 3): Torrent Page 18
