Dream Sky Read online

  “Drop ’em!” Robert yelled.

  The nearest man whirled around and dropped his rifle to the ground the instant he saw Robert’s pistol. The other one—most likely Jacob—started to aim his rifle at Robert.

  Robert pulled his trigger.

  He’d been aiming for the man’s shoulder, but the bullet caught the guy under the jaw and exited by the ear. The man grabbed his face as he dropped to the ground, moaning.

  “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” the other guy said. “You shot him! Why did you shoot him?” He dropped down next to his buddy. “Jacob, hold on. Hold on. You’ll be okay.” He looked at Robert again. “You fucking shot him!”

  Robert knew that, knew it to the very core of his soul, but he also knew he would have done it again. “So he wasn’t trying to kill my friend?”

  The man turned away. “We’re just trying to get home, man. We’re just trying to get home.” He put his hands on Jacob’s wounds in an attempt to stop the bleeding, but blood continued to gush. “Oh, God.”

  Robert took a couple steps closer. “Use your shirt.”

  He wasn’t sure if it would help, but at least it would give the hysterical man something to do. The guy pulled his shirt off over his head and pressed it to Jacob’s face.

  Robert was about to call up to see if Pax was all right when he heard a loud groan of wood behind him. He turned to see a girl, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, nearing the top of the steps, a rifle pressed against her shoulder.

  When he heard the shot, he flinched, expecting to be hit, but her bullet apparently went wide.

  No, he realized as his eyes refocused. It hadn’t gone wide because the shot hadn’t come from her rifle at all. She was the one hit, the bullet piercing her chest and sending her tumbling back down the stairs.

  Robert looked over his shoulder and saw Pax at the other end of the bow, holding his pistol.

  “Don’t shoot!” a voice called from below. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  A woman, about twenty years older than the girl, appeared near the bottom of the stairs, her hands raised. She looked at the body, then up at Robert.

  “I…I…I’m not part of this,” she stammered. “I never…never wanted them to do this.”

  “Come on up, Kat,” Pax said as he walked over to Jacob and the other man.

  The woman gingerly stepped over the dead girl and hurried up the steps, her hands still high. When she reached the top, she jerked to a halt at the sight of Jacob, but quickly recovered and said, “His own damn fault.”

  Pax put a finger against the uninjured side of Jacob’s neck. After a moment, he looked at the other man. “You can let go now, Aiden. He’s done.”

  The adrenaline rushing through Robert’s system finally crashed. That and the knowledge of what he’d done sent him running to the railing just in time to vomit over the side.

  __________

  PAX AND AIDEN dumped Jacob into the ocean, and then with Robert’s help did the same with Avery, the young woman. Luke they left on the top deck with a nasty bump on the back of his head and his hands and feet tied to the railing. They would deal with him when and if he regained consciousness.

  Pax knew they wouldn’t have any trouble with Kat. She’d only been along for the ride, glomming on to the only survivors she had found. Aiden wouldn’t be a problem, either. He was a follower, and with Jacob gone, he might complain a little but he’d do as he was told.

  If there was anyone Pax worried about, it was Robert. When he didn’t see him for nearly thirty minutes, he put Kat in charge of keeping the ferry on course and headed down to the main deck. He found Robert at the back, looking out at the two boats they were towing.

  “Was checking the fuel gauges,” Pax said as he walked up. “We’ve got just under half a tank left. Might be able to make a run at Isabella from here, but I’m not sure. What do you think?”

  Robert was quiet for several seconds before saying, “We should refuel in Limón first. Don’t want to run out when we’re in the middle of the sea.”

  “Yeah. Pretty much what I was thinking.” Pax leaned on the railing next to Robert and watched their wake for a few minutes. Then he said, “Thanks for coming to get me.”

  Robert made no reply.

  “You, um, you going to be okay?” Pax asked.

  “I doubt it.” A pause. “But who is really ever going to be okay again?”

  “True.”

  Silence.

  “Have you ever killed anyone?” Robert asked.

  “I have.”

  “Do you…remember it?”

  “Every night before I go to sleep.”

  Robert nodded. “I guess I have something to look forward to, then.”

  Pax put a hand on Robert’s back. “You did what you had to do. If you hadn’t pulled the trigger, he’d have killed you, and then maybe killed me. If that had happened, this boat would still be heading in the other direction.”

  Robert said nothing for a moment. “What about the plane?” he asked. “It should be there now. What are they going to do when we don’t show up?”

  “My satellite phone’s still on the bus. Didn’t want these jerks getting ahold of it. We’ll call when we get to Limón. They’ll be there.”

  “What if they’re not?”

  Pax allowed himself a tiny smile. “They wouldn’t dare leave me behind.”

  It was nearly midnight before they arrived back in Limón and were able to retrieve the sat phone. For a few minutes, Pax received no answer from the plane. Then, after at least a dozen attempts, he was greeted with a groggy, “Hello?”

  As he’d hoped, the plane had not left. Pax set a new rendezvous time for late the next morning and signed off.

  “Well?” Robert asked as Pax put the phone away.

  “Like I said, still here.”

  They took twenty minutes to motor back to the small tugboat dock at the auxiliary port where Robert had left the fuel truck, but instead of filling up then, they decided to call it a night. They were both exhausted, and didn’t think they could make it across to Isabella Island until after they’d had some rest.

  They moved the now conscious Luke down to the lower passenger area, where Aiden and Kat were. With Pax holding the gun, Robert untied Aiden from the bench they had strapped him to, undid the bindings around Luke’s wrists, then moved back over to the stairs.

  “Listen up,” Pax said. “We’re going to be spending the night here, so that means we’re going to lock the stairway door. You all will need to make yourselves comfortable right here.”

  The two men looked annoyed but not surprised. Kat, on the other hand, looked terrified.

  “Please,” she said. “Please don’t leave me down here.”

  Her message was directed at Pax.

  After a few seconds, he nodded. “You can come with us.”

  “Thank you,” she said, all but jumping up from her seat.

  “What the hell?” Aiden said. “If she gets to go up top, we should be able to, too.”

  “She never held a gun on me. Just be glad we’re letting you sleep here and not throwing you over the side.”

  With that, Pax, Robert, and Kat headed up the stairs. Once back on the main deck, they shut the door and secured it with a rope that even the most talented escape artists would have a problem removing.

  Pax pointed Kat to a bench near the rear of the passenger area.

  “If you try anything, we will desert you,” Pax told her. “Do you understand?”

  “I won’t. I promise,” she said. “You know I won’t.”

  “Good. I just want to make sure we’re clear.”

  “We’re clear.”

  Pax relaxed his stern expression. “I want to trust you, Kat. You know I do. But given what happened, that’s something you’ll have to work very hard to earn.”

  She nodded but said nothing, and then sat down on her bench.

  Robert and Pax moved to the other end.

  “Maybe we should take tu
rns standing watch,” Robert said.

  Pax glanced back in Kat’s direction. “She’s not going to be a problem.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Pax lay down on one of the benches and closed his eyes. “Me, too.”

  January 6th

  World Population

  798,869,034

  8

  MUMBAI, INDIA

  9:41 AM INDIA STANDARD TIME (IST)

  VAN ASSEN PACKED into two plastic cases the weapons and ammunition that had been stored in the closet next to the senior manager’s office. Elsewhere, other Project Eden members cleaned out desks and destroyed equipment that would be left behind after the evacuation.

  The order to abandon the Mumbai facility had come down from the new Project leadership twelve hours earlier. Van Assen was surprised it had taken them that long to make the decision. While the Project’s operations in Mumbai had worked smoothly through the first few hours of implementation, it had quickly gone downhill after that.

  First, senior manager Schmidt had been killed, and a few boxes of vaccine had been stolen by a local Pishon Chem employee who had somehow learned the truth about what was going on. And then, over a week later, that same Indian son of a bitch had returned, freed most of the detainees, and taken the remainder of the vaccine. These events drove Dettling, the new senior manager, to take his own life. In the wake of all this, those who had escaped were probably intercepting any other survivors headed for the facility, because no new survivors had shown up at the station since the breakout.

  A complete and total disaster.

  As soon as van Assen finished packing the final boxes of the ammunition, he looked down the long hallway and whistled at a group of soldiers at the far end. “Two cases here ready to go.”

  After the soldiers took possession of the containers, van Assen went up to the second floor.

  In the aftermath of Dettling’s death, a man named Rainer had been elevated to the senior manager’s position. He was even less qualified than Dettling had been, but, in his favor, he seemed to realize this and was more than willing to cede much of the decisions to van Assen. So, in everything but name, van Assen was in charge of the evacuation.

  He moved quickly through the management housing area, glancing into each room to be sure they had been cleaned out. Satisfied, he went to check on the rooftop communications center via the narrow staircase that had been constructed in a former closet.

  He popped his head and shoulders through the trapdoor at the top and spotted Klausmann sitting at the counter, headphones on.

  “Status?” van Assen asked.

  Klausmann took a moment before he looked back. “The second plane is in the air. The last is ready when we are.”

  Van Assen thought something was a little off with Klausmann this morning, but he figured it was probably a reaction to evacuation orders. He would note it later in the man’s file, but for now, van Assen had other things to check.

  “Tell them we are on schedule, and will be there in forty minutes. Then close up here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Van Assen headed back down the stairs.

  __________

  EMERIC KLAUSMANN TURNED back around as soon as that uppity van Asshole disappeared. The bastard was acting like he was in charge, but he was no more than an assistant. Which, someone should point out to him, put him a level below Klausmann.

  He grabbed the bottle of whiskey he’d been drinking right before van Asshole showed up, and took a sip. Thank God for the metal staircase. He hadn’t heard the stairwell door open, but he had heard van Asshole clomping up the steps, giving him enough time to hide the bottle.

  Who could blame Klausmann for drinking? Things had been screwed up since Implementation Day. Sure, he’d understood that a lot of people would need to die for the Project to reach its goals, but actually seeing it happen was something else entirely.

  The tipping point for him had come when he was on search duty, tasked with conducting a sweep through the Intercontinental Hotel. Right there in the lobby he’d found an old couple sitting on a couch—European, by the looks of them—leaning against each other. He didn’t know how long they’d been dead, a week at least. The worst part was that they looked a lot like his grandparents, both of whom had died years ago.

  That’s when he started drinking, and had pretty much not stopped since.

  He took one more sip of the whiskey, capped the bottle, and set it on the floor next to his bag.

  He reactivated the microphone. “Mumbai base to Mumbai Evac Three.”

  “Evac Three, go ahead.”

  “On schedule here, at your location in approximately forty minutes.”

  “Copy, Mumbai base.”

  “Signing off here. Will see you soon.”

  “Stay safe.”

  Klausmann had to put a hand over his mouth to keep from laughing. Stay safe? Was that not the most hilarious thing someone could say these days?

  He pulled off the headphones and stood up so he could start disabling the equipment. But before he was fully upright, the earth tilted under his feet. If he hadn’t thrown his hand out and grabbed the edge of the equipment rack, he would have fallen through the trapdoor.

  He hugged the rack until enough of his balance returned so that he could stand on his own two feet. He took several deep breaths, knowing he needed to get himself under control and act sober when he went downstairs with the others. The Project did not look kindly on those not pulling their weight.

  Through the windowless walls of the rooftop room, he heard the horns of the waiting trucks, blasting in unison three times.

  The ten-minute warning.

  Shit. I need to get moving.

  Ten minutes to disable the communications room and get his stuff from the barracks was cutting it very close. He couldn’t miss the ride to the airport.

  He took a tentative step toward the counter and felt his head spin again. Not enough to throw him to the ground, but more than enough to know that picking up the hammer he’d brought with him and using it to smash the equipment would be out of the question.

  It’s okay, he told himself. The hammer was a fail-safe anyway. There was still the self-destruct.

  The incendiary device had been installed in the room when it was set up. All Klausmann had to do was input the code into the activation box and enter the desired amount of delay—twenty minutes, per van Asshole—and voila, the place would go up in flames, eventually taking the entire building with it.

  As he leaned down to pick up his bag, another wave of dizziness swept over him. Blindly, he grabbed the straps of his bag and straightened up, forgetting about his bottle of whiskey. After his head stopped spinning, he walked over to the self-destruct box.

  Using all of his concentration, he punched in the code. The tiny screen flashed, and two underlined spaces appeared, waiting for him to input the number of minutes to delay. He typed 2 and 0, and smiled at the box.

  Perfect.

  He headed down the ladder, already feeling a bit more sober.

  Nine minutes later, Klausmann hopped onto the back of his truck, taking a seat next to his buddy Gisler. As they started to pull away, Klausmann reached into his bag for the bottle of whiskey. That’s when he remembered he’d left it on the floor.

  No big deal. He had two more full bottles in his bag. He pulled one out, cracked the seal, and, being the team player he was, passed it around, unaware he had forgotten the final self-destruct step. After inputting the time delay, the ENTER button needed to be pushed, something Klausmann had not done.

  So, instead of commencing the self-destruct countdown, the system waited exactly one minute after Klausman entered the length of the delay and then reset itself.

  2:03 PM IST

  “I THINK WE have waited long enough, yes?” Darshana said.

  Arjun studied the Pishon Chem compound. It had been four hours since the last group of trucks had driven away. Forty-five minutes after that, they had seen a third milit
ary cargo plane rise above the city and turn north.

  Since then, all had been quiet.

  He nodded. “We need to be careful, though.”

  “They are all gone.”

  “That may be, but think of what these people have done. Think of what they may have left there in case anyone shows up.”

  “You think they may have contaminated everything?”

  “It is possible. We will have to wash down afterward, and destroy any clothes we have on.”

  They took with them only items they could afford to discard, and left the rest of their things in the building they’d been watching from.

  It felt odd to enter the compound through the open front gates. The only other time either of them had come in that way had been in the back of one of the Project Eden vehicles after they were captured in the city. Arjun almost expected guards to rush out of the gatehouse, guns drawn, shouting at them to drop to the ground. But all they could hear were the birds calling to each other high above and the background buzz of insects that seemed to be growing louder.

  They knew from what they’d seen in the city that the spray containing the Sage Flu virus left a sheen behind that lasted for several days. But as they passed several of the compound’s buildings and dozens of cars that had been left behind, they spotted no sheen.

  They came next to the dual holding areas where the people who’d shown up at the survival station had been put—infected in one, uninfected in the other. Both pens were empty, their gates hanging open. And still no sheen.

  They moved on to the buildings that had been used as barracks, first by the locals who had falsely thought they’d been hired to help eradicate malaria-spreading mosquitoes, and then by the fake UN soldiers brought in after the outbreak. Once again, no sheen.

  “Should we check inside?” Darshana asked. “Make sure no one is here?”

  Arjun looked at the building again. He didn’t like the idea, but she was right.

  With a nod, he approached the door and cautiously opened it. On the other side was a hallway, lit only by the sunlight Arjun had just let in.