At Any Cost Box Set: Books 1 - 3 Read online

They just hadn’t come with an option for turning off his brain. A shortcoming that he was starting to really hate the manufacturers for.

  He reached out in the dark and felt around for his phone, which he knew he’d left right next to his pillow. When he found it, he slid his finger along the bottom to wake it up and glanced anxiously at the time. Past midnight: 12:31. Terrific.

  There were several problems with living underground—and by yourself—and one of the biggest so far was the fact that there was nothing to do. Once your brain got started spinning, there was very little to stop it. And no one to talk to about your fears.

  He glanced at the corner of the screen, where his updates generally sat, then sighed and glanced at the opposite corner. The other problem: no cell phone coverage. If anyone was trying to get a hold of him, he wouldn’t know it until he got back up to the surface.

  Garrett flopped over on this back and tried talking to himself, to see if it would be any better. “At least you’re safe down here, man,” he said quietly. “Too many people up there can’t say that. They don’t have beds to sleep in, and they don’t have any safety. Hell, they might not even have their families anymore.”

  He slammed his eyes shut at that and cursed himself for a fool. How exactly did he think this was going to help him feel better? Now all he could think of was his sister—who was one of those people up there in the chaotic world, and most certainly at risk of death.

  Kady. The name alone had him smiling in the darkness. His older sister who had still been smaller than him—and to his mind more vulnerable—Kady had always had a mind of her own. And she’d never been shy about sharing her thoughts with him. She’d always been too bookish to pay too much attention to the world around her, and ever since he could remember, he’d taken that as all the reason he needed to play her protector.

  God, he must have been a royal pain in the ass. Two years younger, always at least two inches taller, and constantly getting into her business. Vetting the people she was friends with. Giving the evil eye to any guy who got too close to her. Staying after school to walk her home when she stayed in class later to study. Their mother had told him relentlessly that he needed to stop, needed to let her take care of herself. But their dad hadn’t been in the picture and Garrett had seen himself as the man of the house—which meant taking care of his sister, older or not.

  His mom had been dead for some time, which made Kady and her husband and son the only family Garrett had left. And it was that thought that had him jumping to his feet and grabbing for his jeans.

  It was no wonder he couldn’t sleep. He was down here on his own, plenty of food and water and safety, while she was up there on the surface where things could go wrong at any time. He had to get in touch with her, convince her to get her butt to New Mexico and join him. He had plenty of provisions for her and her family, and he’d never be able to forgive himself if anything happened to them when he could have tried to help.

  Yeah there was still a chance that Jordan would show up. And if he did, and he found Garrett and his family there…what? What could he possibly do? Worst-case scenario, Garrett would have to move his family somewhere else.

  At least they would be together. With luck, they’d be able to start figuring out what they were going to do when the world turned right-side up again.

  It took him three seconds flat to get into his jeans, and then he was at the elevator, pushing the button and waiting anxiously for the doors to slide open. He needed to get in touch with his sister, and to do that, he needed to be on the surface, where his damn phone worked.

  Chapter 3

  “What do you mean you won’t come?” Garrett asked, his heart sinking to his feet.

  He hadn’t expected it to be an easy conversation. But he’d also forgotten how horrendously stubborn his sister could be.

  “Garrett, we’re fine,” Kady said, in that annoying I’m-your-older-sister-and-I-know-best tone. “We’re all the way in Oregon. It would be too long a drive to get to you.”

  “Too long a drive to save your own life?” he asked sharply. Then, knowing that wasn’t going to be enough: “To save Zach’s life? Jon’s?”

  It was a low blow. He wasn’t denying that. Her boy, Zach, was only ten, and he was Kady’s weak point. And she would have done anything to protect her husband.

  He could practically see her disapproval on the other end of the phone. “That’s low, Garrett, even for you,” she said, her tone cold and judging.

  Garrett cast his gaze over the dark landscape and sighed, wishing there was something out there for him to focus on. Something to tell him what to do.

  “I’m just trying to protect you, Kady,” he said, his voice broken. “Have you seen what’s going on out there? In the hospitals? In the street, for God’s sake?”

  Another low blow, because of course she’d seen what was going on. You couldn’t avoid it, no matter how much you wanted to. People who had thought they were healthy suddenly falling dead in the street, blood foaming out of their mouth. People who knew they were sick running around like lunatics, grabbing at people and desperately begging them for help as the blood started to stream from their lips. It was everywhere. Everyone knew someone who had been affected. Everyone knew many people who had been affected.

  “I’ve seen it,” she affirmed. “On the news. It’s not here yet and it’s not coming here. We’re in a safe zone, Garrett,” she said, her voice turning softer. “It’s moving south, not north. If anything, you should come here, not vice versa.” She paused like she was thinking, and he could already hear the lecture coming.

  She always meant well. But they rarely agreed on the smart course of action.

  “I’m worried about you,” she said quietly. “I’ll never understand why you moved so far away, and why you stayed there. Come home, baby brother.”

  At that, Garrett stifled a sob. He wasn’t the crying sort, not usually, but there was something about what she was saying that drove right into his heart, and then twisted. He wanted his family. There was no denying that. But she was wrong about Oregon being safe.

  “The only safe place is a place where other people aren’t breathing, Kady,” he replied. “Tell me you’ll at least think about coming here. There’s plenty of food, plenty of water. Plenty of space. We even have a killer gaming console down here for the kid.”

  She huffed out a laugh. “I’ll think about it. But you think too, huh? About coming here?”

  A ghost of a smile passed over his face. “Yeah, I’ll think about it. I don’t get coverage down in the bunker, but I’ll come up to the surface every couple of days. Call me if you need me, Kady. I mean it.”

  She gave him her promise, then teased him about having called her in the middle of the night—and woken her up—and then he pressed the “End” button, his heart in his throat.

  He wasn’t a hero. He’d never been a hero—or at least he’d never set out to be. But he was a family man. And he would have given anything right then to have his family with him. With them in Oregon, he chose the next best thing, and strode back toward the elevator, intent on getting lost in an RPG where the rules made sense and the enemy was someone you could shoot.

  Chapter 4

  By the next morning, Garrett had managed to not only set up the Internet in the bunker but also wire the computers, a single TV, and the gaming system. The solar panels he’d installed in the roof of the silo were working perfectly, converting the sun’s rays into an easy and consistent source of power—which would never run out, assuming the sun continued to exist.

  If the sun ever stopped shining… Well. They would have much larger problems than not being able to watch TV.

  In the meantime, the wiring had kept his brain busy for the rest of the night and the morning. The bad news was that having the TV and Internet meant that he now had access to the news—which was more curse than blessing. Because what he was seeing was nothing good.

  Nothing worse than he’d expected, obviously. He’d seen ter
rible things happening before he moved down here. But a part of him had hoped things would have somehow improved. They hadn’t.

  The news was full of shocking images, and each of them seemed to him to be more shocking than the last. One broadcast showed a park that had been sectioned off into cages, more or less, the chain-link fencing giving each person little more than a five-foot-by-five-foot area. “The quarantined,” they called them, and he shuddered at the word.

  Their country had gone years without suffering a serious outbreak of sickness, and the word “quarantine” was something they’d placed on history’s shelf—at least when it came to people. The fenced-off area, the cages, the bars… It all looked like something from the misty past, from times that were better left forgotten.

  But they were right there, in the present. The sickness was in the present. In America, where things like this weren’t supposed to happen. And now Garrett was starting to wonder if there was going to be anything left of it at the end of this thing.

  It had all started in such a promising manner. The foremost lab in the U.S. had announced a breakthrough new technology: nanobots in injection form. A shot that could cure you of anything. Anything. Heart disease. Cancer. Diabetes. A predilection for Alzheimer’s, or a tendency toward obesity; you name it, the nanobots would rid you of your ills.

  Science had never been Garrett’s thing, but he’d always pictured it as millions of little soldiers, going into the bloodstream and getting to work on whatever needed fixing. Maybe soldiers who were crossed with construction workers. And the amazing thing was that it had worked. Thousands of society’s richest had jumped at the chance—despite its hefty price tag—and rushed to their doctors for the injections.

  And they’d started healing. Their diseases had been reversed. Their age spots had disappeared. Their lines and wrinkles and gray hair, all gone. They’d not only healed, but seemingly stopped aging, as if those little bots were actually giving them the secret of life.

  Society at large had been agog—and then they’d started celebrating. The fountain of youth, found! And all it took was taking that leap of faith and allowing your doctor to inject you with robots.

  The more squeamish had raised their hands and pointed out how wrong it all was, but for the most part people had started saving their pennies, trying desperately to come up with the $100,000 it cost to have the procedure. People had sold everything. Mortgaged their houses. Borrowed up to their credit limits. It had seemed like the sky was the limit. Finally, immortality was at humanity’s fingertips.

  And then, that winter, the deaths had started. Garrett closed his eyes and gulped, remembering the pictures that had started flooding into the media soon after. No normal deaths, these. No graceful sliding off into the darkness as you slept. No, these people’s lungs gave out on them, their blood vessels exploding until they were drowning in their own blood.

  Garrett couldn’t imagine it. He didn’t want to imagine it. Yes, he’d gone to military school, but he’d never joined the military itself, and there was a good reason for that. He’d never been in love with the idea of death. Never been fearless in the face of danger. Never been brave enough to face the Grim Reaper down.

  That sort of death, that sort of suffering, was more than he could imagine experiencing.

  Then things got even worse. People who hadn’t had the injections started dying, too. It had been bad enough when it seemed as though the injections—those miraculous soldier nanobots—hadn’t been what they appeared. But it hadn’t made any sense that people outside of the test subjects were dying as well. These other people had never had those shots, and yet they were dying in the same horrible, helpless way. The same way the doctors didn’t understand, and the hospitals couldn’t stop.

  It had spread so quickly. It had seemed unstoppable.

  Before long, the government had made an announcement. The nanobots had evolved. “They” had come to see aging itself as a virus. They’d responded by shutting down the host.

  The people who’d been injected had a bomb in their blood. The robots that had been meant to save them were now the enemy—and they were killing them.

  And then, somehow, the bots began to spread. The “healing virus” passed to others. Again and again, with no recourse. No ability to hide. No recovery. Once someone was affected, they were doomed.

  A few days later, the medical establishment had announced that there was a cure: it was some sort of MRI treatment, available only in hospitals with that sort of equipment. It was a treatment that took quite a bit of time, with each session lasting half an hour.

  Garrett remembered the day he watched the announcement clear as day. He’d sat back and chewed on his lip. He’d seen MRI machines. Never been in one himself, thank God, but he’d seen them on TV shows and the like.

  Used in the past—in the more rational version of the world—MRIs, or magnetic resonance images were pictures of the inside of the body: the organs, bones, and veins. All those things that lay underneath the skin. They’d been used to diagnose things like cancer and internal bleeding, when the world was still sane.

  In the past, when things like that would actually get the time to kill you. Before the nanovirus, which pulled the very air from your lungs within days.

  MRIs used magnetic fields and radio waves, the announcer went on, and those magnetic fields killed the nanobots. The announcement offered nothing on how this had been discovered, but the outcome seemed clear: if someone could get into a hospital with an MRI machine within twenty-four hours of showing symptoms of the nanovirus, they could be cured.

  “Amazing,” Garrett had breathed, feeling a flash of hope rushing through his veins. What if it was as simple as that? What if that was the cure, and the victims of the virus could all just go in and get flashed with the magnetic thingies, and that would be it?

  Moments later, his answer had arrived.

  “…Only available to the very wealthy,” the newscaster was saying. “And, unfortunately, out of reach for most of us. At least for the time being.”

  The man had snapped his mouth shut then, as if he had a lot more to say and was stopping himself only because he didn’t want to get in trouble, but it wasn’t hard to figure out what he was thinking. His eyes were sunken into his face and haunted with the residue of many sleepless nights, his skin a pale, jaundiced color. The man was the picture of sickness, and even if he wasn’t showing any symptoms yet, Garett knew it would only be a matter of time.

  The irony would almost have been funny, had the circumstances been different. The very people who’d been able to afford the technology, the ones who’d introduced a deadly, fast-acting new virus to the world, were now the only ones who could afford to be rid of it.

  As for the ordinary people, they were all doomed, every one of them, if the government didn’t come up with some sort of real solution to what was quickly becoming a crisis.

  Four months on, by the time Garrett had run for the military silo and safety, entire towns were dying, riots were rocking the larger cities, and gangs were taking over entire swathes of the suburbs. Places where families had once lived were now crypts, home to the desperate and the dying. And quarantine zones like the one Garrett was seeing on TV had sprung up in every city.

  Not that they did any good. They kept the sick and dying in a specific place, he supposed, but so many people didn’t even know they were sick. Or they didn’t accept it. And as soon as they started showing symptoms, they were capable of spreading the sickness to others.

  Garrett’s neighborhood had been overrun by people who looked like little more than zombies, the hope gone from their eyes, and he’d jumped into his truck and fled into the desert. Now, it seemed that even this sanctuary wouldn’t be enough to protect him from the vision of what American society had become.

  Staring at the screen, at the news story that continued to play, he wondered again whether it would even matter. Even if he survived, would there be anything to go home to?

  Chapter 5<
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  Garrett turned away from the news, hitting the power button on the remote and shutting his eyes for a moment.

  “Idiot,” he muttered. “What did you think you were going to see, puppies and rainbows? You knew what you were getting into.”

  A part of him had always been too sunny to truly match with reality. A born idealist, that was him. And that was the part that was suffering more and more, these days.

  He’d been hired by numerous clients to prepare for the worst. Nuclear war or environmental temperatures that rose so high so quickly that humanity couldn’t survive. He didn’t think any of them had ever thought society would be brought down by something that was supposed to save it. Something human scientists had actually brought into being.

  Now, of course, they knew better.

  He strode toward the other wall, stopping by the refrigerator to get some water, and came to a halt in front of the two large screens mounted on that wall. As he broke the seal on the bottle of water and took a sip, his eyes scanned the fourteen separate windows on the screens, each of them showing full-color representations of the surface above him. Directly above him, in fact, as these were recordings taken of the land around the silo.

  A state-of-the-art system, these cameras were attached to the solar panels and never turned off. They showed exactly what was going on above him at all times, and though he’d originally installed them thinking they would show his client whether any intruders were coming to raid his silo—or even as just an interesting way to take in the view without having to go outside—he now saw a different usage for them.

  If he was going to survive this disease, he needed to avoid contamination. He couldn’t come into contact with any other human being—and he needed to know if anyone had been around the area, so he could be careful about touching anything up there. It had been reported that the virus could last for twenty-four hours on surfaces outside of the human body. If a sick man, woman, or child came around the silo and happened to sneeze on anything, Garrett would have to stay below ground for a full day if he wanted to protect himself.