Celeste Johnson stood in the back of the comm room, eyes narrow. “Well?” she asked.
“Still nothing, ma’am,” the comm operator said.
Less than an hour earlier, they had received a message from the Los Angeles survival station that said a large number of survivors had shown up. L.A. was supposed to have reported in with a follow-up thirty minutes ago, but none had come, and all subsequent attempts to reach the station had gone unanswered.
Chicago was another matter altogether. While the station was still in contact with New York, it had been attacked in a coordinated effort to free a group of survivors scheduled for elimination. One of those in the attack had apparently been a Project Eden technician, a traitor within their organization. He was killed as he led the survivors out of the facility, but others on the outside had used explosives and gunfire to create diversions that allowed the prisoners to get away.
Of course, neither event was the first time a station had experienced difficulties. There had been minor flare-ups here and there, and, most spectacularly, the escape at the Mumbai station that had necessitated the closure of that facility.
Celeste was tempted to send out a general warning, but she wouldn’t allow herself to imagine either event as something significant. She decided that in the morning, she would send a team to Chicago to find the troublemakers and destroy them.
As for Los Angeles…
“Keep trying,” she instructed the operator.
37
“We have twenty-nine locations ready to go,” Crystal said over the phone. “A few won’t be much more than window dressing, but the others should more substantial. Just waiting for your go.”
“Very soon,” Ash said. “Don’t stray too far away.”
“Glued to my chair.”
Ash hung up and walked back over to the others. “So?”
Without looking back, Bobby Lion said, “Give me a few more seconds.”
They were in a hollow behind some rocks on a hill a quarter mile east of the town. Bobby and the people he’d arrived with had set up a monitoring station with four five-inch screens sitting on a crack in one of the boulders. They were being fed by cameras placed around the town, and all monitors were in night-vision mode.
Right around midnight, not long before Ash, Chloe, and their group had arrived, Bobby had spotted someone walking through the streets. At first he had thought it was one of the guards he’d already identified, but all four were still in place. He tracked the silhouette all the way to the location of guard number three, where some kind of conversation occurred. The new arrival apparently took over guard duty, while the man he replaced headed through town the way the other man had come.
Unfortunately, at that point, only four cameras had been up and running, and Bobby had lost the guard as the man reached the north end of the village. Since then, Bobby had been trying to figure out where the guy went. One of the team members had been sent out with a camera and was moving around the town at Bobby’s direction, trying to pick up the guard’s footprints in the snow.
When Ash had gone to take Crystal’s call, Bobby had traced the path through several streets but still had no end point.
“I need you to move fifty feet to your left,” Bobby said into his radio. “Then aim along that road leading out of town….Yeah, the one that dead-ends.”
Ash leaned over Bobby’s shoulder as the feed in monitor five repositioned. The road in question was a flat expanse covered with snow.
“Zoom in,” Bobby instructed. “Slowly. Eastern edge.”
The picture darkened as it pushed in, the tighter angle cutting down on the amount of ambient light the lens could pull in.
“Stop,” Bobby said. “There.” Bobby pointed at the monitor.
Along the edge of the road was a depression in the snow, almost a trough. It appeared to be…
“A path?” Ash asked.
Bobby grinned. “That’s what it looks like to me.” He switched back to his mic. “Marcos, you see that dark line on the edge of the road?…Right, that one. Follow it out. Let’s see where it goes.”
Omega Three walked over to his bag and pulled out his thermos of coffee. With a clear sky, the temperature was a lot lower than it had been in the last week, so staying warm was going to be a challenge. He really should have brought two thermoses. He’d have to remember that for tomorrow.
God, he hated the graveyard shift, he thought as he sipped some of the warm liquid.
The teams rotated on a weekly basis. Tonight was Omega team’s first night back on the eleven p.m. to seven a.m. shift. What he wouldn’t give to be in his bed, under his blankets, fast asleep. Maybe he should have done what Omega Two had done and feigned illness. Not that Omega Two wasn’t sick, but Omega Three couldn’t help but feel envious the guy had spent only an hour on duty.
Have to remember that trick.
He finished his coffee and pushed all thoughts of his bed out of his mind. It would only make him crazy.
His thermos back in the bag, he returned to his post, and once more took up scanning the ghost town below.
The group Wicks had been following was clearly not the Project Eden patrol he had thought it was.
Instead of entering the town, the group went around it, leaving behind what he’d discovered were cameras at strategic points, each covering a different portion of Everton. Leaving the cameras in place, he continued to follow the patrol to the eastern hill, where the team set up camp.
Then, within the last hour, the patrol had swelled in number with the arrival of a larger group. If not for the cameras, he might have thought these people were a band of survivors who’d come together and were looking for someplace safe to stay. If that had been the case, he would have moved on long ago. But they obviously weren’t simply a group of survivors, so he thought it best to figure out what they were up to, make sure they wouldn’t mess up his plans.
Very carefully, he worked his way through the trees so he could get close enough to their camp to hear what they were saying.
Chloe heard a subtle crush of snow. It had come from up the hill to the left.
She took a quick head count, thinking someone might have wandered off to take a leak, but everyone was there.
Another crush, slight and slow, like someone taking a long time to lower his or her foot.
As casually as possible, she moved behind the group, going right, away from the noise. After she was out of the hollow, she angled up the hill fifty feet before coming back across to the right. There she paused and scanned the hillside between her and the others.
It wasn’t long before she spotted the shadow among the trees, creeping downhill, right where she thought it would be.
Wicks stopped, knowing he had gone as far as he dared.
For several seconds there was silence. Perhaps they were whispering, in which case he wouldn’t be able to safely get close enough. Then a voice, not loud, but enough for him to hear.
“What is that?”
Another voice. “I don’t know. A storage building? Whatever it is, that’s where the trail leads.”
The third voice did not come from in front of him. It came from behind.
Right behind him.
“Don’t move.”
He could feel the breath of the words on the back of his neck. He wanted to turn and see who it was, but what did it matter? He was caught.
“On my command, you’ll stand up. Nice and slow. You try anything and my knife will cut through you before you realize it. Nod if you understand.”