At Any Cost Box Set: Books 1 - 3 Page 5

  And at least it would give him some direction. Because he’d had enough of sitting around waiting to die. Enough of rotting down here in a bunker, hiding from the sickness. Running might only be a half-step up on the bravery ladder, but at least it was something.

  Chapter 9

  July 4

  Garrett stared up into the darkness over his head, his brain too busy to sleep, his eyes too tired to stay open for much longer. He felt as though he’d been awake for days, and for all he knew, that was the truth. Honestly, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept through the night. Couldn’t remember the last time he’d fallen asleep the moment his head touched the pillow. Or even within hours of his head having touched the pillow.

  He missed being able to shut his brain down in that manner. Missed the deep, senseless sleep he’d been able to enjoy before the sickness came. Before the world fell apart around him.

  The problem was, his brain wouldn’t sit still. Now that he’d started thinking about the idea that he could run for the border—and perhaps for a safer life, though it would be a life of unknowns—he couldn’t stop thinking about it. The opportunity to start all over again, the idea that he might be able to get out of this country safely, without giving up his life, was almost too sweet to bear. It was nearly too golden for him to think about for long, and for that reason he’d been avoiding it like a sore tooth. Like something that was too bright to look at for more than a few seconds.

  He’d also been avoiding it because of what it might mean, though, and he was honest enough to admit that. Yes, it could mean getting away from here with his life intact. Yes, it could mean starting a new life, far away from the death and decay that now filled the United States. Yes, it would mean wide open space, fresh air, and being around other people again. All things that he wanted so desperately he felt as though his soul was crying for it.

  But it would also mean all those things. Moving to a new country and the society of people he didn’t know. People who didn’t belong to him, and who he could never call family. And a move away from the United States, which had always been his home, and which held a piece of his heart.

  It was a solution that was part blessing and part curse, part promise and part threat, and he hadn’t decided yet how he felt about it—or even if he could really do it.

  “Chicken,” he muttered, not for the first time.

  It had become a common occurrence, this insult, and there were a lot of reasons for it. He was afraid to go up to the surface, afraid to go to any towns. Afraid to make the run for Mexico.

  And he hated himself for that fear. He didn’t blame himself, necessarily, but he did hate that this was who he’d become. A frightened man living in a bunker, where no one could get him.

  “Well, there’s only one way to fix that,” he said, shoving his feet out of the sleeping bag and onto the freezing floor.

  He shivered as the iciness ran up into the souls of his feet and started making its way up his legs, and he moved quickly for the pants and boots he’d left hanging over his favorite armchair. Slipping into them before he could rethink his plans, he scooted over to the surveillance screens and ran his gaze across them.

  Nothing but blank, open desert out there, caught in the wash of the moonlight and swept by the nighttime wind. It was beautiful. And completely empty. Perfect for what he’d suddenly realized he needed.

  He yanked a sweatshirt over his head, wiped his face quickly with his hands to wake himself up, and then grabbed his phone and headed for the elevator. He hadn’t been out of the bunker in days. It was beyond time for some fresh air—and the fresh thoughts he hoped would come with it.

  The moment the door opened onto the outside world, he started feeling better. He headed toward the desert on the other side of the driveway.

  The moon was high and bright tonight, giving everything a sharp, jagged outline, almost like it was all cut directly out of paper. Nothing looked real. In fact, it didn’t even look three-dimensional. Just cut-outs leaning up against the night sky.

  The sand below his feet was unnaturally bright in the moonlight, the cacti and scrub brush unnaturally dark. In the distance, he could hear owls hooting back and forth to each other and a pack of coyotes yipping and crying as they chased some hapless creature. And the smell…

  The smell was clean and sharp, warm sand and cool rocks, with the tang of the summer-blooming cacti and agave. It was a uniquely desert smell, and one that only seemed to come out at night, when the temperatures cooled off enough for scents to travel. During the day, the evaporation was too quick, the heat too intense. But at night, the desert gave you a bouquet of aromas that you would never find anywhere else.

  It had been one of the things that drew him here after he left school. And it had been one of the reasons that he stayed. But he’d forgotten about it. Forgotten about the nighttime walks he’d taken two or three times a week, out in the desert. The camping trips by himself, where he just sat and watched nature as it swept past him. The time he’d spent in the cold, silent night, just watching the stars turn overhead.

  Now he closed his eyes and listened to the coyotes, and the small rustlings of rats or rabbits in the brush to his left, and for a moment, just a moment, he allowed himself to pretend that none of it had happened. The injections. The sickness, and the death. His client. Kady. Ninety percent of the population. For just a moment, he let it all melt away, and felt his shoulders relax, the muscles around his mouth start to let down. And then, just like that, he could breathe again.

  He opened his eyes and looked up into the stars, which never ceased to amaze him out here in the wilderness. So much brighter, so much larger and more powerful than he was. So much more powerful than they all were. The night sky had always been more beautiful out here in the desert than it was in the cities. But being underground for so long made him appreciate it even more.

  Turning, he started to look for his favorite constellations. Cassiopeia. Orion. He’d just found the striking line of stars that made up Orion’s belt when a deafening explosion burst through the sky, followed by another, and then another.

  Shocked, Garrett dropped to his knees, and then his belly, using his hands to cover his head the way he’d always been told to do when he was younger. What was that? Were they under attack? Who the hell would attack America now—and why? What was the point, when the country was on its last legs as it was?

  He got his elbows under him and started hustling toward the closest boulder, moving army-man style to keep a low profile. There would be scorpions and snakes in this sand, and scooting through it like this was incredibly stupid, but he wasn’t about to stand up and make himself a target for whoever was shooting at them. Yeah, it was unlikely that anyone was looking for a target in the middle of the New Mexico desert, but there was absolutely no reason to take the chance.

  He was halfway there when three more explosions tore through the night air, right on top of each other, and this time he saw the flash from one of them. Due east, if his instincts were right, and the explosion wasn’t on the ground. Instead, it was in the night sky, several miles above the ground.

  “What the…” he wondered aloud. Then he started crawling again.

  By the time he made it to the stone he’d decided on, he’d come up with some ideas. Whatever those were, they hadn’t been bombs. At least no bombs he’d ever seen before. There would be no point in detonating them that high up in the atmosphere. Minimum damage up there. Even if they were nukes and whoever had shot them was counting on nuclear fallout, it seemed beyond stupid to waste the explosive payoff.

  Why sentence your enemy to death by nuclear fallout and waste the explosive part of the bomb? And when it came to that…why bother with nuclear fallout when your enemy—since he assumed whoever had shot those explosives had wanted Americans dead—was busy dying of their own accord, courtesy of something the medical industry had thrust upon them and then absolutely failed to cure?

  He crouched next to the boulder for se
veral minutes, hardly daring to breathe and trying furiously to figure out what was going on. When no further explosions happened, though, he decided that it was probably safe to move—and that it would be far safer to be in his bunker than up here in the open. After all, if someone was dropping bombs on them, he’d prefer to be in a bunker that was designed to withstand them.

  Though the fact that the bombs had exploded in the atmosphere was still gnawing at him. There was no logic to it, and that bothered him. He didn’t like unanswered questions—and he hated things that didn’t make sense.

  After forcing himself to wait what he estimated to be five more minutes, just in case, Garrett stood and began creeping toward the door of the bunker.

  He moved stealthily, going from cactus to boulder to cactus to maintain his cover, the way he’d learned at the military academy, and though he realized that he would probably look royally stupid to anyone watching him, he still wasn’t comfortable with making himself a target. Once he got to the driveway, he sprinted across the open patch toward the door, dove through the opening, slamming the door behind him.

  Then he allowed himself to breathe again. The night sky was a wonderful thing, and he loved the openness of the desert, but there was no denying that being in a building was a safer situation. Especially when someone appeared to be dropping bombs on you.

  He took two more steps forward and jammed his finger at the button for the elevator, his mind flying now with ideas of what might have happened—and plans for how to figure it out. To his surprise, though, there was no response.

  Frowning, he pushed the button again, harder this time, and looked up at the indicator light above the doors. The elevator should be right here. It didn’t return to the lower floor unless he was in it requesting to go down there.

  But still there was no response. No lights, no dings, nothing.

  He pushed the button one more time, starting to get desperate. He tried to remember if he’d seen anything in the blueprints for this place that indicated whether the elevator went offline for any reason—and what to do if it did. He’d seen the breaker box for this place, and the elevator hadn’t been listed on it. Had there been another breaker box that he’d overlooked this whole time?

  He didn’t think there was. He’d gone over the blueprints with a fine-tooth comb to make sure this place could stand up to the renovation his client had in mind for it, and he didn’t recall anything of the sort. The only other control panel up here was the one to switch the elevator to manual mode.

  But there was no denying that something had happened to the elevator. He could activate the manual override and use the pulley-and-lever setup. However, that was a lot of work. And right now, he didn’t want to get into a moving box when he didn’t know what was wrong. Thankfully, he had an alternative.

  Cursing at the delay, he turned sharply to the right and made his way to the other shaft that led downward. This one he had built himself, just in case the elevator ever stopped working. It hadn’t been a popular choice, given the expense, but he’d told Jordan that they needed something to use as a backup. Now he was glad he’d insisted on it.

  It was going to be a very long climb. But it would take him down into the safety of the bunker, and that alone would make it worthwhile. It would also give him a very long time to start putting together a list of things that might be wrong with the elevator itself. Right after he tried to figure out who would be shooting bombs into the atmosphere over New Mexico.

  The moment he opened the door into the shaft, though, Garret’s stomach started turning. It was dark in the shaft as well—and there should have been emergency lights in there. He pulled the flashlight he always carried out of his pocket and hit the button for the light—nothing. It was dead.

  Shit.

  Grimacing, Garrett took a quick step onto the first rung of the ladder. The descent was quick, but his mind wasn’t on the physical actions. Instead, he was worried about the problem of the lack of light. First the elevator, then the light in this tunnel. What the hell was going on here? Was it a malfunction with the electricity in the bunker itself? Or maybe the nearest transformer?

  He forced himself to slow his descent, realizing that he’d been going far too fast—and that it wouldn’t do him any good to slip and fall to the bottom. He’d be down there by himself, probably wounded beyond repair, and if his suspicions were correct, he’d be down there in the dark.

  None of that was good.

  He started taking more precaution with his handholds, telling himself that getting to the bottom faster wasn’t going to solve anything. The problem would be the same whether he got there in ten minutes or fifteen.

  When he did finally get to the ground floor and set his feet on the concrete base of the bunker, he breathed a sigh of relief, then moved by memory to the cupboard where he’d stored the candles and lighters, just in case there were ever a problem with the electricity supply. He quickly lit a candle and set it in a holder, his stomach settling as it illuminated his immediate area, then he turned to the right and went into the engine room.

  He hadn’t been here in some time, and there was a good reason for that. It had been the first room he’d built—the place where all the machinery was housed—and once it was finished, he hadn’t bothered with it much again. Yes, it had brought energy into the place and had been a pain in the ass to get sorted, but he’d built it so that it wouldn’t require much supervision.

  Once everything was running, it hadn’t required his management. But now as he stepped in, he realized that the room sounded wrong. It was dead quiet in here, and there should have been several machines running. The piece that coordinated the solar power, the piece that kept the lights on, and most importantly, the piece that guaranteed fresh air into the bunker.

  It was something that too few people thought about, but he’d been keenly aware that this set of rooms was going to exist far underground, where there was no airflow. The machine he’d built was one of his own design, and sucked air from the surface through a specialized tube, then routed it into the bunker itself. Another tube sucked air back out and ran it back up to the surface so there was a constant turnover—otherwise anyone in the bunker would have eventually suffocated for lack of fresh air.

  All those machines were silent now, and Garrett cursed.

  What was going on here? He’d constructed those to be foolproof, and to continue to function through any nuclear blast.

  He quickly stepped toward the far side of the room, and the machine he’d never used before. The backup generator was much smaller, but it would do what he needed until he figured out what was wrong with the larger generator and the rest of the machinery. He stepped to the side, threw open the door to the control panel, and hit the power button.

  Nothing.

  He hit the power button again, but still didn’t get a response. One more attempt and he was starting to think he had a serious problem.

  Pulling his phone from his pocket, he tried to wake it up. Nothing. Using the candle to illuminate his wrist, he glanced at his watch—fully electric and supposedly indestructible.

  The face was black and blank.

  “Shit,” he breathed, the pieces falling into place far too quickly.

  Being careful not to extinguish the candle flame, he quickly stepped into the main room of the apartment, looking around for anything he could try to turn on. Yes, the generator was off, but things like the computer and TV had battery-powered backups in them and should still have plenty of juice.

  Neither of them responded when he tried to turn them on. And at that point he knew. He’d armed this bunker with everything a man could possibly need—including back-up power sources. This place could have withstood a goddamned nuclear bomb.

  But the one thing his client had insisted wasn’t going to happen in the United States was a bomb that would fry all electronics. Jordan had been adamant that the government would never let that happen. Countermeasures would be in place to keep a bomb like that from
ever reaching our airspace, so why spend money to protect against something that surely wouldn’t occur.

  Garrett wasn’t positive what it might have been that was exploding in the sky, but it seemed obvious that it had taken out any and all machinery in the area—which meant that everything down here was now unusable.

  The next mental jump was an obvious one: no one had access to bombs like that. At least not that he knew of. But the military was almost inevitably filled with things he’d never even dreamed of. And if anyone was responsible for this latest development, his money was on them.

  It took Garrett ten minutes to climb his way back out of the bunker, and when he got to the surface, he gave himself several minutes of bent-over heaving as he tried to recover from the journey. When he finally stood up again, he headed for his truck. He’d just come to the conclusion that he’d have to pack up and get out of here, and to do that, he’d need a vehicle. Better check it.

  But when he got in and hit the button for the engine, there was no turnover. Not even a click. Not even a hiccup or a murmur.

  He hit the button again, already knowing that it was a wasted effort. Just like the contents of the silo, the internal electronics of his car were fried.

  As the silence marched on, he cursed himself for a fool.

  No car. No phone. And no livable space, not anymore. The bunker would be out of air within a matter of days, with a human down there using it all up, and without lights or power he wouldn’t be able to keep the place running or the food edible.

  He was finished here.

  This complicated his plan to get out of town, but he was even more sure now that he needed to go. It was Mexico or nothing for him. But before he could get started, he needed a vehicle that was still working. And that meant going to town for the first time in weeks.