No yells for him to stop. No bullets hitting the ground around him.
He’d been right. For the moment, no one was watching.
He examined the back of the fence, found the latches holding the two sections together, and unhooked them.
As soon as the wall parted, he said, “Jilly, now!”
She climbed out of the hole and sprinted over to him.
“Stay here until everyone is through,” he said. “The instant the last person comes out, close the gate.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Figure out where we go from here.”
When Dr. Lawrence and Dr. Rivera entered the room used for large group intakes, they expected all the other administration personnel who usually helped out to be there. Surprisingly, only two others were present.
“Are we in the wrong place?” Lawrence asked.
Dieter Schneider, the man in charge of survivor viability assessment, shrugged. “I just got here myself, but I do not think so.”
“Then where is everyone?” Rivera asked.
The girl sitting in one of the chairs said, “There were more people here, but the director got a call and she took them with her.”
“When was this?” Lawrence asked.
“About two minutes ago.”
“Did she say what we were supposed to do?” Schneider asked.
“The only thing anyone told me was to say here.”
They were probably up in the director’s office, Lawrence thought. She turned for the door.
“Where are you going?” Rivera asked.
“Well, I’m not staying here. If something’s going on, I want to know what it is.”
Apparently so did Rivera and Schneider. They followed her upstairs and found the others not in the director’s office, but in the security monitoring center down the hall. Formerly a conference room, it was now equipped with dozens of monitors, each showing feeds from different cameras around the stadium. The director and the rest of the management team were gathered in front of two of the biggest monitors.
Lawrence walked up to the group. “What’s going on?”
“Problems,” Hughes, head of supply, whispered.
“What problems?” Lawrence asked, looking at the monitors.
Each displayed a lit-up slice of the parking area surrounding the stadium. One was completely empty, while in the other was a large group of people talking to seven members of Project security.
“Just watch,” he said.
“Is this live?”
He shook his head. “Happened a few minutes ago.”
Except for the size of the survivor group, it seemed no different than other encounters Lawrence had witnessed. If all stayed to form, within a few minutes the guards would be escorting the survivors to the stadium for processing. But things did not stay to form.
Before she realized what was happening, several of the survivors had weapons in their hands. Others grabbed the guards, stripping them of their rifles. One of the guards struggled free and tried to make a run for it, but the man who’d taken his rifle smashed it into the guard’s back, knocking him to the ground. The guard tried to rise but the man hit him again, this time in the head. The guard collapsed and stopped moving.
“Oh, my God,” Lawrence said. “Who are these people?”
“We don’t know,” the director said. “Three large groups arrived at once. We sent teams to intercept each, but we’ve lost contact with all of them. This is the only one we have on camera, but I assume the others have met with the same fate.”
“A coordinated attack?” Schneider said. “Why?”
The director turned and looked at him. “Let me take a stab in the dark. Perhaps they’ve discovered the true nature of our business here?”
“How…how could they possibly know that?” he stammered.
“At the moment, I don’t care. I’m more concerned about the safety of this facility.”
“How many guards are missing?” Lawrence asked.
“Nineteen.”
The facility had a twenty-five member security force. Six was not nearly enough to guard the stadium.
The director was clearly on the same wavelength. “Have everyone in your departments report to the armory immediately,” she said, scanning the managers assembled behind her.
Hughes grimaced and said, “But they don’t all have training for—”
“I don’t care what they’ve been trained for,” she said. “Go! Get them—”
“Director!” Rivera shouted from the back of the pack. “The detainees!”
They all turned toward him. He was pointing at a small monitor that showed a wide shot of the stadium’s interior from the press boxes above home plate. All three holding areas could be seen in the image, but everyone was looking at the gap in the center-field fence. They watched as two people ran out from somewhere behind the immune compound and through the opening.
“Goddammit!” the director yelled. “How many?”
“At least three,” Rivera said. “Shouldn’t the guards have…” He stopped, obviously realizing no guards were currently inside the stadium.”
“What are you all standing here for?” the director asked. “Go!”
Martina raced toward the back of the stadium, her legs aching from her days of walking. But it was easy to ignore the pain.
Ben was here.
She was so focused on her destination that she didn’t see the two soldiers running toward her until they shouted at her to stop.
She nearly tripped over her own feet, and had barely stopped when two gunshots rocketed across the parking lot. The uniformed men dropped to the ground.
Seconds later, Pax and Nyla ran up, rifles in their hands.
“What are you doing?” Nyla shouted.
“I…I…”
“You need to get back to your post,” Pax said.
“No! I can’t. Ben. He’s there. I saw them.”
“Your boyfriend?” Nyla said. “I thought you told me he was dead.”
“I was wrong. He’s alive. He’s inside!”
She stepped to the side to get past them and head for the stadium, but Pax snagged her around the waist.
“Let me go!” she yelled. “Let me go! It’s Ben!”
“It’s too dangerous,” he told her.
She twisted and turned but couldn’t break his grip. “Let me go. Please! He’s there. He’s trying to get out! I need to help him.”
“What do you mean, trying to get out?” Nyla asked.
“I was watching the stadium and saw that they’ve dug a hole under the gate of the tarped area. Someone was standing outside. When he turned, I saw it was Ben.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“And you think he was trying to get out?”
“Yes! Yes! Now please let me go.”
Nyla and Pax shared a look.
“All right,” Pax said. “We’ll go together. But you need to stick with us.”
“Sure, sure. Whatever. Come on!”
With no staff assigned to the medical assessment department other than the two of them, Lawrence and Rivera were the first to reach the armory. Rivera used his code to get inside, and they each selected a pistol because, like most non-security Project personnel, it was the only type of weapon they’d been trained on.
As they exited, Rivera turned in the direction of the lab.
“No. Follow me,” Lawrence said as she started jogging the other way.
“Where are you going?”
Without stopping, she said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m not about to lose a whole group of potential test subjects!”
Keeping as close to the stadium as possible, Gabriel led his team to a ticket-holder entrance along the third-base side. The gates were solid on the bottom, but the tops were covered with heavy wire mesh. As expected, all gates were locked, but Gabriel’s team had come prepared for that.