“The Project thanks me?” While there was still anger in her voice, it was now tinged with fear. “You’re not the Project. You don’t get to make that kind of decision.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. I am the Project, and your failure to realize that is the reason my men are there now. But know this. When the trigger is pulled—”
“Wait! No!” she blurted out, her voice full of fear and desperation.
“—it’s not being pulled by the man there with you. It’s being pulled by me.”
“Mr. Perez, I…I’m sorry. I didn’t understand the sit—”
“That’s right. You didn’t.”
Perez nodded once. Behind Nakamura, Sims raised his gun, put it to the back of her head, and removed her from the Project.
21
Someone was shaking Martina’s shoulder.
With a groan, she tried to turn away. It was much too early, she was sure of it. By the time she’d gotten home and fallen asleep the night before, it was after two in the morning. She had promised herself she really would sleep as late as possible today, noon if she could manage it.
“Martina, come on. Wake up.”
She opened her eyes, surprised. Her father was standing over her. He never woke her up.
“What’s going on?” she asked, her voice still full of sleep.
“Get up, get dressed, then come downstairs.”
She glanced at the clock by her bed and groaned. She had barely slept six hours. “Did I forget something? Are we supposed to be somewhere?”
But her father was already heading out the door. “Just get ready and come down.” With that, he was gone.
She sat up and blinked several times, trying to shake the sleep from her system. As she swung her legs off the bed, she noticed that several drawers of her dresser were open. She hadn’t left them that way the night before. When she got up and walked over to shut them, she was surprised to see they were empty.
What the hell?
She checked the other drawers. Several pairs of pants were missing, and her sweaters, too. Then she noticed that someone had laid some clothes out for her on her desk chair.
More confused than ever, she pulled them on and hurried downstairs to find out what was up.
A cold wind was blowing in through the open front door. Out the living room window she could see her father and brother over near the garage, putting something in the trunk of the car. Above them, high gray clouds dimmed the day.
Something banged in the kitchen.
“Mom?”
Martina stepped off the last tread of the staircase onto the cold tile floor and walked to the back of the house.
Her mother was near the kitchen sink. On the counter in front of her were boxes and packages of food. It looked to Martina like everything from inside the cabinets had been pulled down. Her mother was going through it all, sorting them into groups.
“Mom, what’s going on?”
Her mother jerked around with a start. “Oh, Martina. I didn’t hear you come down.” She attempted to give her daughter a smile, but quickly gave up. Her eyes strayed down to Martina’s feet. “Where are your shoes?”
“Where I left them when I took them off last night,” Martina said, as if it should have been obvious.
“Well, hurry and put them on.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Just do it!” her mother said sharply.
Martina took a step back, surprised by the intensity of her mother’s tone. “Okay. No problem.”
Her mother closed her eyes for a moment. “I’m sorry. Please, just…put them on, okay?”
“Sure. I’m putting them on.”
Martina retrieved her shoes from the entryway, slipped her feet inside, and laced them up. From a peg by the door, she grabbed her zip-up hoodie and headed outside.
Her dad and brother were still at the back of the car. They had lowered the hood of the trunk, but it looked like there was too much inside for it to close all the way.
“Donny, grab me some rope,” her father said.
Her brother ran into the garage.
“Dad, would you please tell me what’s going on?” Martina said.
Her father glanced over. “Good, you’re dressed. There are some water jugs in the garage. Can you put them in the backseat for me?”
“Dad!”
He looked at her again, and finally seemed to register her earlier question. “Did you see the TV?”
“The TV?” She shook her head. “It was off.”
He stepped over to her and put his hands on her arms. “I don’t want you to panic.”
“You mean like you guys already seem to be doing?”
“The shipping containers they’ve been finding all over the place? The rumor is it’s some kind of biological attack.”
“What?” She pulled away from him, her mind assaulted by memories of the outbreak that had almost killed her. That, too, had been a biological attack.
“I said, don’t panic.”
“What is it? Who did it? Do they even know for sure?” The questions jumped out rapid fire.
“The government’s not saying anything yet, but that doesn’t matter right now. What we need to focus on is getting out of here.”
She grew still. “Getting out of here? Did they find one in town?”
“No,” he said quickly. “But they’re all over Los Angeles, and some in Bakersfield and Las Vegas.”
They were surrounded.
“I don’t want to be here when someone who’s been infected shows up,” he explained.
“But where are we going?”
“The Fullers’ cabin. They went back east for the holidays, so no one’s there.”
The Fullers’ cabin was in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, not that far away. Martina and her family had borrowed the place for a week just that past summer.
He looked her in the eye. “I really need your help. Are you going to be okay?”
The person she’d been before the previous spring would have probably argued with him, saying he was overreacting, and that they should just wait and it would probably turn out to be nothing. But coming so close to death changed all that.
“I’ll get the water,” she said.
“Thanks, sweetie.”
They took the back way to the cabin, using one of the winding roads that went up through a steep valley on the desert side of the mountains. When they’d taken the same road in the past, it had always been sparsely traveled. This time, there were dozens of vehicles, all heading up.
“Looks like other people were thinking the same thing,” Martina said.
Her father barely nodded in acknowledgment. He had a tight grip on the wheel, and his mood had darkened every time he glanced at the cars behind them. She knew he’d been hoping they’d be alone.
At the top of the canyon, the road crested over a pass into a high plain, where the desert gave way to the thin fringes of a forest that thickened with every passing mile. Here and there were small patches of snow, a few inches deep at best. That might change soon, Martina thought. The clouds that had been hanging high above their desert valley were much lower here, and were dark and heavy with moisture.
“You brought the tire chains, right?” she asked.
“Of course we did,” Donny said. “They’re in the back. What do you think? That we’re stupid?”
He was fourteen and in that wonderful phase that made Martina want to be nowhere near him pretty much all the time. Still, she held back the response that wanted to jump from her lips. It wouldn’t serve any purpose, and he was just being a kid anyway. The restraint was a grown-up move on her part, one she would have patted herself on the back for if she wasn’t so scared.