Ballistic: Icarus Series, Book Two (14 page)

“Alright, everyone,” Zander’s voice boomed through the empty lobby pulling me from my own head. “The sun won’t be down for a couple more hours yet. It’s probably still a good one hundred and twenty degrees, and it’s dusty as Hell out there. Grab a drink, soak your scarves and everybody mask up.”

“I think I’d rather save my water for when I really need it.” Ty slid the plastic bottle into one of his side cargo pockets. “Don’t wanna be without if we end up stranded.”

If my dad had been there, he would have protested that to no end. He believed that survival was one hundred percent determined by a person’s mental strength. He always said that in a survival situation, a person’s number one priority was to preserve their mind. The mind would take care of the rest. He called it the
survival the law of threes
.

No matter where our rough-it camping trips took us, or what we were doing, the law of threes was pounded into my head before we ever took our first step into the wilderness. My dad would make me say it over and over again.

The brain can survive three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food, and three months without human contact. None of that matters if the brain goes.

I’d listen to that annoying speech a million times if it meant I could hear his voice again. As it was, I hadn’t heard it since the strange vision I had after the hospital bombing. Eli said the whole thing had been a hallucination caused by a mild seizure. I refused to believe my vision had been a side effect of smoke inhalation.

My father
had
been there. He was trying to tell me something. There was no way I could have imagined it. The specter of my father knew things that I could never have known. He urged me to be strong and insisted that I lead the others to salvation. Unfortunately, he hadn’t stuck around long enough to tell me how to do that. I needed him now more than ever, but for the time being, he remained silent.

“Hold on, Ty,” I said shaking the dark thoughts off like a layer of dust. “I know we are low on water, and it’s tempting to ration it to make it last longer. That is the last thing we should do. If you get thirsty, you should drink. If you wait until you are desperately in need of water, then it’s probably too late for whatever tiny bit of it you have to make a difference. It’s much easier to stay hydrated than to rehydrate when you’ve already lost too much.”

“I guess that makes sense.” Ty dug his water bottle back out and hesitantly sipped from it.

“Besides,” Riley said as she slid her dampened scarf up over her mouth and nose. “Our next stop is only a few miles from here. We should be good, right, Liv?”

“Right,” I said wrapping my scarf over my face. That same sick feeling settled into my stomach.

“Awesome,” Riley said in that upbeat way of hers. “I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t wait to meet Liv’s brother. I bet he’s a real spitfire, just like his big sister.”

“You have no idea, Ry,” I said smiling in spite of my worry. I made my way over to the shattered remains of the glass doors at the mall’s main entrance. My boots crunched over the glass and wire that scattered the floor. After a quick peek through the frame, I waved for the rest of the group to follow. “Let’s get out of here, shall we?”

“Right behind you,” Jake said as he and Falisha shuffled through the field of broken glass. Once he reached the door, he turned and shouted back to his sister. “Be careful, Christa.”

“Duh,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Allow me,” Ty said crouching in front of her. “Hop on, little lady.”

“Are you sure,” Christa asked nervously. “What about your leg?”

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with my leg, darlin’,” he said, hiking the hem of his shorts so she could see what was left of his wound. The skin had already knit itself back together, a pale purple starburst of a scar sat where the gaping hole had been less than six hours ago. “See?”

“Holy crap!” Christa’s eyes bugged. “How—?”

“Hush, now and get on,” Ty laughed slinging her up onto his back.

Christa giggled with excitement, and the rest of her question fell flat. With his hands hooked under her knees and her slender arms wrapped around his broad shoulders, Ty set to a gallop. He tromped right over the broken glass, and then jumped through the empty frame of the front door, and out into the orange sky. He skipped down the ramp with Christa bouncing against him, chuckling the entire way.

Thankfully, Eli thought well enough to carry Bella out so she wouldn’t step on the glass. The second he stepped through the doorframe and set her down, she took off at a sprint leaving Eli in her dust. He walked down the decline walkway shaking his head at Ty and muttering under his breath about him being
immature.

Perhaps he was a bit childish at times, but Ty was a savant when it came to handling Christa and her many mood swings. As far as I could tell, with the exception of food and sleep, he was the only thing in the world capable of shutting that girl up. For that, I believe we all owed him a debt.

“You wanna drive?” Zander dangled the keys in front of my face with a smirk. “I don’t mind riding shotgun, and you could definitely use the practice.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not,” I shrugged, and scooped a wayward hair back into my scarf.

“You alright?” Zander asked, sliding his hand into mine.

“Yeah, sure,” I lied, which was pointless.

“
Liv.
” Zander wasn’t buying it. Even if he hadn’t been able to read my emotions thanks to our weird alpha-beta bond, a rock wouldn’t have believed my pitiful attempt at a half-truth.

“I’m scared,” I rubbed the eagle’s wings between my fingers and swallowed past the lump in my throat. “What if—Zander, what if something has happened? What if we get there, and Beans is—?”

“Stop right there,” Zander said grabbing my hand and tugging me toward the truck. “You don’t get to lose hope before you have even tried to find it, Liv. Just breathe, and take it one step at a time, okay?”

“Okay,” I sighed trailing behind as we made our way to the construction site next door.

It took much longer to unbury the truck than it had to hide it in the first place. The wind had kicked up quite a bit since we had retreated underground. Not only was the rust-colored sky thick with dust and soot but the gusts had shifted many of the pallets and boards we had used to shield the truck. Some had gotten wedged against each other at odd angles making them quite difficult to pry apart. In the end, Zander was forced to break several of them into pieces.

By the time we finally freed the deuce from its dusty prison, we were all exhausted, dehydrated, and a bit battered. We had also lost almost an hour of daylight. While that gave us a much-needed drop in temperature, it would also mean a significant decrease in visibility. If we were going to get to my brother before dark, we had better hope the road to Byron was clearer than the one coming into Oregon had been.

“Everybody in?” Zander asked. I nodded, and the engine rumbled to life beneath us. “Alright, then. Let’s go and get your brother.”

It took some doing to navigate the truck out of the construction site without blowing any tires. Soon enough, Zander had us back the road and on our way out of the tiny township of Oregon. I stared out of the window as we rolled slowly along and did my best to ignore the path of destruction the scritters had left behind. I hadn’t seen even one of those little monsters since we had come out of the mall but the distinct tracks the hoard had left behind suggested they were either headed in the same direction we were, or they had come from there.

Cars littered the streets at an increased frequency as we wove our way through downtown and headed toward the highway that would take us to Byron. From what Private Nicholas had told us, the most common presentation of the GRS pathogen, or the
Gamma Virus
as the military referred to it, was death. The horrible black spatters inside the vehicles told me these people had been caught on the road when Icarus hit, rather than fleeing after the fact.

“All those people. I still can’t believe they’re just
gone
,” Falisha said softly as she pressed her hands to the window. “That could have been us.”

She was half-right.

Most who were infected were not fully compatible with the virus. The lucky ones died instantly, their bodies unable to withstand the radiation and parasitic virus as it tore through their systems. Others went through what was no doubt a painful metamorphosis from which emerged an animalistic creature hell-bent on destruction and death. My death to be specific.

In a way, I sort of pitied them. They would never live as they had once lived. Leeches lost all that had once made them human; love, compassion, and even pain. The darkness that consumed them was akin to purgatory. What remained was a hollow shell devoid of possibility or hope. Was life really worth living in the absence of such things?

Adaptives, like Zander and myself, were apparently ideal hosts for the parasite (lucky us). Both of us had fallen ill, but despite a few narrow escapes, and a growing list of unexplained mutations, the virus had not proven to be fatal for either of us. It had, however, created a connection between us, and all others (human or otherwise) with the virus.

“Anything on the radar, you two?” Jake poked his head up between the seats. “Leeches, scritters, anything?”

“A little tingle, but nothing big,” I said rubbing at the faint flutter in my chest. “Not since we left Morrison, anyways.”

“Not so much as a tickle,” Zander shrugged, “and believe me, you’d know if I felt anything. If any of those
things
are out here, they are either way ahead of us or way behind. We should be okay, for now.”

“Right,” Jake said, “but neither of you has your scanners set on
rogue military kill squad
either, so there’s always that fun little nugget to worry about.”

“Ugh, Metz,” Zander growled turning to Jake. “I swear to you the next time I see that guy...”

“Looks like you may not have to wait,” I said pointing straight ahead. “I think we just missed him.”

“What the hell?” Zander slowed the deuce to a stop in the middle of the highway.

He put it in park but left the engine running and we climbed hastily from the cab. Eli and Riley scrambled from the back of the truck and joined us. The road that lay before us looked as though it had been plowed. Vehicles lined both sides of the cracked pavement, their doors and windows scraped and crushed as each had been shoved free of the road.

“What happened here?” Riley stared down the blacktop in confusion.

“They painted something on that truck down there.” Jake shielded his eyes and pointed to an overturned trailer about a half a mile down the road. “Liv, would you mind?”

“One, one, seven to Seco
.
What is that, Spanish?” I squinted against the sun. Even with the sunglasses filtering some of its rays, my newly enhanced eyes were particularly sensitive to light. “Below that it says FB35M.”

“What does that even mean?” Riley scowled. “Is that some kind of code or something?”

“The numbers might be coordinates, or an address maybe, but Seco?” Zander stared down the road. “I honestly don’t know.”

“Seco. Seco. Hmmm.” Eli shoved his glasses back up his nose. “Where have I heard that before?”

“Hey, guys,” Jake poked his head out through the front door of the truck. “I don’t mean to rush you, or whatever, but we only have about thirty minutes of daylight left.”

“Right, of course,” Eli said shaking himself. “We had better get moving before we can’t anymore. I’ll look through the journal and Gunther’s bible. Maybe there is something in there about this
Seco
.”

Once Eli and Riley wrestled Bella into the back of the truck again, they both climbed in after her. Zander and I settled back into the cab, and we all set off down the freshly cleared highway. The path was wide enough for the deuce to drive straight down the middle with a good three feet of clearance on either side. I hadn’t noticed any clear options for exiting the trench, but for now, I was grateful for the chance to get to our destination as quickly as possible. I scanned the vehicles for any signs of life as we slowly rolled through the trench of mangled metal but aside from the spatters of blackened remains that greeted me, there were none.

“Slow down a second, Z,” Jake said pointing out our side of the truck. “Look at the river.”

“Damn,” Zander whistled when I rolled down the window.

“That seems really low,” I said squinting at the orange that reflected from its choppy surface.

The once muddy banks of the Rock River, where I had spent many a summer swimming and fishing with my dad, had dried to a parched gray and cracked like the sands of the Sahara. The water had receded out past the first buoy. The bright orange marker that had once floated at a depth of five feet now lay on its side in the dust.

“The sky,” Jake said craning his head out the window.

I mimicked his position and gaped up at the clouds. The gritty winds rushed through my hair. The cloud cover had created a wall high above us that stretched clear to the horizon. The formation was so thick and choked with dust and smoke that it appeared to be solid. The darkest clouds had begun to take on a greenish hue. They churned in on themselves converging toward the center.

“I have a bad feeling about this, you guys,” Jake said rubbing furiously at his temple while he rolled his window back up. “Can’t this thing go any faster? We should go faster!”

“Take it easy, Jake,” Zander said. “This thing is diesel. I promise you I am going as fast as I can without burning extra fuel.”

“I don’t care how much fuel it burns, Z,” Jake lunged forward into the front seat and pointed out the front window to the large rear view mirrors mounted to sides of the hood. “We need to get to Byron, and we need to do it now!”

In the mirror, we saw lightning split the sky less than a mile behind us sending a shower of sparks and flaming debris up into the air. A second later, another struck not too far from it. Whatever faint pull I may have been sensing in my chest ceased to exist.