Dream Sky (25 page)

“True,” Nyla replied. “And there are other things I could tell you that you may or may not believe.”

“Did you see the video on TV?” Gabriel asked.

“Why do you think I’m here?” the woman responded.

“I don’t mean the video that claims to be a message from the UN. I’m talking about the one that went up several days go from that reporter who used to be with PCN.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Nyla was already shuffling through her phone. She found Tamara Costello’s video and hit
PLAY
.

The woman watched, rapt, as Tamara explained what was really going on.

When the video ended, she stared at the screen for several seconds before saying, “I don’t know. I don’t…”

Nyla watched her for a moment, then glanced at Gabriel and nodded. They both took a few steps back, giving the woman space.

“If you want to continue on, we won’t stop you,” Nyla said.

The woman shifted her gaze between the two of them.

“My…my friends are there,” she said. “We were supposed to meet there. I…I…”

Gabriel’s chest tightened. “When did they go there?”

“New Year’s Eve.”

A week before.

Gabriel wanted to say something comforting, but he thought the woman’s friends were likely dead.

She stared at the ground, and when she looked up again, her eyes were hard and determined. “Can you show me?”

“That’s probably not a good idea.”

“You want me to believe you? Show me.”

Nyla considered the request. “Gabriel can take you.”

“Thank you.”

“If it saves your life, we’re happy to do it.” Nyla held out her hand. “I’m Nyla.”

The woman shook it. “Martina.”

__________

M
ARTINA GABLE DIDN’T
know
what to think. Were Nyla and Gabriel telling her the truth? Was it possible the UN message had been a fake? That its purpose had been to take even more lives? Only a few short weeks ago, that would have sounded like conspiracy-theory bullshit. But a few short weeks ago, there hadn’t been survival stations and the release of a virus that had killed who knew how much of the human race.

And then there was the video from that Tamara Costello. Martina had seen the reports the woman did during the spring outbreak. The news said the woman had died during the mini-epidemic, but clearly she had not. Her words, more than anything else, were what kept Martina from marching up to the front door of Dodger Stadium right then.

Until she had more proof, she’d keep her guard up, something she’d stopped doing the last few days.

When she had finally caught up to the woman driving Ben’s Jeep, and been told Ben was dead, Martina had slipped into a state of despair. She still couldn’t remember where she had gone or what she had done in the forty-eight hours that followed. Her family, most of the people she knew, and then Ben. It was too much.

After she finally began to pull out of her funk the day before, she’d found herself near the ocean in Santa Monica. She had wandered out onto the pier, passed the arcade games and amusement-park rides, to the very end, where she leaned against the railing and stared out at the vast, empty sea.

She knew she had a choice: she could either give up or take control again and live. In the face of all the loss caused by the pandemic, could giving up be considered a weak decision? She vacillated on the answer for a while, but as more of the fog lifted from her brain, she saw the truth. Giving up
would
be weak. She had to live. If not for herself then for those she knew who had died. Besides, she still had friends who were alive. Friends, she realized, who were not far from where she was at that very moment.

Her first thought, of course, had been of Noreen and Riley and Craig, but she didn’t know where they were. What she did know, though, was where they would eventually go, if they hadn’t already—the survival station at Dodger Stadium.

She figured the stadium couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen miles away at most, so that afternoon she had walked off the pier and headed east, deciding to go on foot and use the time to fully clear her mind. She grew tired not long after sunset, so she found an apartment free of the smell of death and collapsed onto a couch in the living room.

It was as dark when she woke as it had been when she’d lain down. She checked her watch and saw it was about ten minutes to one in the morning. There was no question of going back to sleep, though. The anticipation of seeing her friends again would not allow it.

She hit the road and walked alone through the darkened streets. Alone, that was, until she’d heard Gabriel behind her.

Now here she was walking beside him into a hilly neighborhood north of Sunset Boulevard.

“I thought I was closer to the stadium than this,” she said after they’d been hiking for a while.

“You were, well, are. It’s over there.” He pointed to the right. “We’re going around to the backside. Same place we shot the video. Best view.”

The sun began to rise as they headed up a ridge road. The left side was lined with homes, and the right with a narrow valley filled mostly with trees and grass.

They continued until the valley began to close.

“Going off road now, so watch your step,” Gabriel said.

He led her down the slope, staying under the trees to avoid the open grass areas. At the bottom, they came to a four-lane street.

Gabriel paused under the trees and scanned the road before whispering, “Quick across.”

In a sprint, he led her to the other side and up the eastern slope. At the top, they crossed a smaller road and moved rapidly through a cluster of buildings. A sign identified the area as the Los Angeles Police Academy. Unlike most of the other places Martina had seen, the parking lot was jam-packed with cars gathering dust. She guessed they belonged to recruits and active officers who had been called to a duty they never completed.

She and Gabriel moved down the edge of a clearing, then along a trail that paralleled the main road, and passed another building complex before finally stopping.

“We’ll cross here and go up that hill,” he whispered, pointing at the land on the other side of the road. “Follow exactly where I go, and if I motion for you to get down, don’t hesitate.”

“I won’t.”

He checked the road in both directions, and then sprinted across. Martina followed right behind, matching Gabriel step for step. Once more under the cover of trees, they climbed the small slope and headed south until the hill began to descend again. Through the branches, she could see glimpses of the large parking area and the stadium, but her view was too obstructed for her to make out many details.

Gabriel knelt and removed his pack. From inside, he pulled out a pair of binoculars and motioned for Martina to follow him. Staying in a crouch, they worked their way to the right until most of the foliage in front of them cleared away, and then stretched out on the ground.

There it was. Dodger Stadium, the banks of seats brightly lit by the morning sun.

Gabriel looked through the binoculars, adjusted the magnification, and handed them to Martina.

She raised the glasses to her eyes.

“Concentrate on the center,” he instructed. “Over that black barrier separating the two outfield bleachers. Like I said before, the angle isn’t perfect, but…well, just look.”

The eye line he suggested allowed her to see a portion of the outfield area and all of the infield, or at least where they used to be. Now, like she’d seen on the video, there were fences cutting across the grass and dirt, with posts hammered into the field.

“They look empty,” she said, taking in the two larger areas.

“What do?”

“The…detention areas? Is that what you called them?”

“The first few days they were pretty full, but after Tamara’s video knocked that phony UN message off the air, the number of new arrivals decreased considerably. Out of those who still came, we’ve been able to get to most of them first.” He paused. “Now look around the grandstands. Lower deck, top end, right before it disappears.”

Martina focused in on the seats and slowly began to pan across the stadium. “What am I looking—” She froze.

“You see them?”

“Yeah.”

Dead center in her binoculars, facing the playing field, was a soldier with a rifle. She searched some more and found others, all facing the field. It was all exactly as Nyla and Gabriel had said. Granted, none of it proved this wasn’t a UN operation, but her doubt was beginning to fade.

She refocused back on the field and noticed something she’d missed before. “There’s another fenced-in area in the outfield.”

“As far as we can tell, it’s a special holding area. It went up a few days after the survival station opened.”

“Why is it covered like that?”

“We’re not sure. Maybe so people in the other enclosures can’t see inside.”

“Maybe my friends are in there,” she said.

“I don’t want to get your hopes up,” he said. “It’s more likely they were put in one of the other two. If any of them were sick, they would have been in the one to the left, the rest in the other.”

“They’re immune so they wouldn’t have been put in the sick one,” she said.

He silently cursed Nyla for putting him in the position of dealing with this. “Most of those who have survived are simply lucky, not immune.”

“I realize that. But we’re all immune. We had the flu.”

His eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”

“We were all sick, you know, during the outbreak last spring. I’m pretty sure it made us all immune.”

“How many friends are we talking about?” he asked.

“Well, there were nine of us, but me and three of the others headed north to look for my boyfriend.”

“Your boyfriend?”

“He had the flu, too.”

“And you know for a fact he’s still alive?”

Water glistened in her eyes. “He was. He’d left messages for me on my phone. But…” She fell silent, remembering what the woman on the road had told her.

“These five other friends of yours,” Gabriel said after a moment. “They’re the ones who went to the survival station on New Year’s Eve.”

“Yes.”

He stared out at the stadium, then whispered, “Is that what it’s for?”

“What are you talking about?”

He looked at her as if he hadn’t realized he’d spoken out loud. “The special enclosure. I was just…well…see, none of the other survivor stations have reported a similar space. But that would make sense, wouldn’t it? Los Angeles is the closest station to the spring outbreak. If those who had survived the spring outbreak are actually immune, this would be the station they would come to. So once Project Eden realized it, I would think they’d want to separate them from the other survivors.”

“Who is Project Eden?”

“That’s the people running the stations.”

“So you’re saying you think my friends
could
be in there.”

He hesitated, and then nodded. “I think it’s a possibility.” 

She lowered the binoculars, but kept her eyes on the stadium. “We have to get them out.”

“I might be wrong. There’s a good chance they aren’t there. Besides, there are only eight of us here. That means those guys with the rifles outnumber us more than two to one.”

“Not eight. Nine. You’re forgetting about me.”

22

SURVIVAL STATION, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BELINDA RAMSEY

ENTRY DATE—JANUARY 7, 8:00 AM CST

T
HE DOCTORS DIDN’T
come
back until this morning. Woke us up again just like yesterday. They read more names. Sixteen. This time no one else volunteered to join them.

I don’t feel like writing anything more.

23

STATE OF RAJASTHAN, INDIA

11:53 PM IST

N
EITHER SANJAY NOR
Kusum had ever been so far outside Mumbai. In fact, until the outbreak, neither had ever ventured more than a few miles from the city. That had changed when they moved to their new home at the former boarding school. As for Darshana, she had been to Goa several times to visit family, but nowhere else.

The thing that felt the strangest was being so far from the ocean. It had always been there, a constant in their lives even if they didn’t see it every day. Now it was growing farther and farther behind them, the distance feeling somehow suffocating.

They took the expressway, most of the time surrounded by kilometers and kilometers of untended fields, some barren and waiting to be planted, some fully grown and waiting for a harvest that would never come. There were few cars on the road, so for the majority of the trip, they were able to maintain a steady pace.

The tense moments came as they skirted around larger cities like Akota and Ahmedabad and Udaipur. At least Mumbai was a city they had known. These others were masses of unfamiliar buildings and homes where millions had once lived. Ahmedabad was the worst. The wind was blowing in such a way that even with their windows rolled up, they could smell the death.

It was almost a blessing when night fell and all they could see was the road in front of them. But that brought its own sense of eeriness. A land of over a billion people being so dark and unpopulated seemed impossible, as if someone had built giant blinders along the sides of the road to keep the normal life beyond out of view.

A sign ahead announced Jaipur was only fifty-four kilometers away. Forty minutes and they would be there.

“Would you like me to drive now?” Sanjay asked Darshana. He had taken the first shift that morning, driving for nearly six hours before turning over the duty to Kusum. Five hours after that, Darshana had assumed the driver’s seat.

“I’m okay,” she said. “But thank you.”